Free Republic

Sears Holdings Corp. said Friday that its Kmart stores were hit with a data breach that compromised some shoppers' debit and credit card information. The company is working with federal authorities and security experts to investigate the matter. The Secret Service confirmed Friday evening that it is investigating the data breach. The investigation indicates that the breach occurred in early September and did not affect kmart.com customers, the statement said.

Criminals have discovered a flaw in OS X, the Mac operating system, and are using it to control thousands of Apple computers around the world. The Russian security company Dr. Web first discovered the software, known as "Mac.BackDoor.iWorm." We don't yet know how the software spreads, but Dr. Web has released information on the clever way it connects to the criminals who control the program. When a Mac is infected with Mac.BackDoor.iWorm, the program tries to make a connection to a command server. The iWorm reportedly uses Reddit's search function to find comments left by the criminals in a Minecraft...

Microsoft is about to introduce Windows 9 next week at an event, ahead of its widespread release in 2015. The project for the next Windows operating system has been given the internal code name as Threshold. Microsoft watchers have noted that the next OS could indeed be a needed threshold move to win back business users who were put off by Windows 8 because of its tiles-based interface instead of the start menu they had relied on in Windows 7 and older Windows versions. The frustration was palpable last year, and one example was a posting in Micro Doctor, a...

Unless you’re a real-life version of Sheldon Cooper, a computer security professional, or, like me, work in the online payment industry, you probably don’t keep up with the latest computer vulnerabilities.  A new one that’s hit the web news like a tsunami in the last 72 hours is simply called “the bash bug” (sometimes called “shellshock”).  Everyone from Time, to Vox*, to tech site C|Net has covered this story. I am not going to get technical here.  You can read any of the above-mentioned articles which provide plenty of detail on that.  To summarize the problem:  a 25-year-old program that’s...

A remotely exploitable vulnerability has been discovered by Stephane Chazelas in bash on Linux and it is unpleasant. The vulnerability has the CVE identifier CVE-2014-6271 and has been given the name Shellshock by some. This affects Debian as well as other Linux distributions. You will need to patch ASAP. Bash supports exporting shell variables as well as shell functions to other bash instances. This is accomplished through the process environment to a child process.  The major attack vectors that have been identified in this case are HTTP requests and CGI scripts.  From Akamai:  Akamai has validated the existence of the vulnerability...

Credit: Thinkstock RHEL/CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, and OpenSuse have far more similarities than differences, but choosing the wrong one for the job can make life much harder Unlike most other desktop and server operating systems, Linux comes in a wide variety of flavors, each based on a common core of the Linux kernel and various GNU user space utilities. If you're running Linux servers -- or Linux desktops, for that matter -- you should understand the important differences and be discerning about which flavor of Linux is best suited to any given situation. This article will help you do...

Well, the HiTech RedNeck is looking for a job... AGAIN. This job hopping is getting old, but the boss of the group, at a major freight railroad, for which I'm a contractor has an integrity problem, to put it delicately. For some reason, I don't get along very well with liars and phonies. Well, I refreshed my resumes on Dice and Monster this past weekend and crossed my fingers. Well this morning what do I behold, but someone wants to know if I am interested in working for a company that turns out to be BLOOMBERG MEDIA. They are quoting...

Billions of dollars are spent every year on shrinking the size of transistors, for good reason.Smaller transistors have superior performance characteristics but the main reason for the shrink is because the smaller the transistors are, the more you can squeeze into a chip.  That means you can get better performance from smaller chips, allowing you to squeeze more chips on to the same wafer – and the more chips on a wafer, the more money you make per wafer.Take this example of a 40nm wafer and a (more advanced) 28nm wafer:The left wafer (40nm transistors) has chips of 150mm^2,...

<p>I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that with regard to entertainment, conservatives and libertarians find science fiction and videogaming to be the most attractive options offered by pop culture these days, mainly because there’s a lot of SF that doesn’t try and stuff political correctness and half-baked socialist egalitarianism up our snouts. The same goes for videogames, which are mostly about killing bad guys and/or solving puzzles.</p>

(Phys.org) —By using voltage-generated stress to switch between two magnetic states, researchers have designed a new non-volatile memory with extremely high energy efficiency—about two orders of magnitude higher than that of the previous most efficient non-volatile memories. The engineers, Ayan K. Biswas, Professor Supriyo Bandyopadhyay, and Professor Jayasimha Atulasimha at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, have published their paper on the proposed non-volatile memory in a recent issue of Applied Physics Letters. "We are excited that we have been able to come up with the idea of a strain-switched memory element capable of 180° switching using a simple geometric...

A pretty neat little film about the various parts of the mechanical fire control computers of those days, and how they are applied to real-life gunnery issues.

More than 1,000 U.S. retailers could be infected with malicious software lurking in their cash register computers, allowing hackers to steal customer financial data, the Homeland Security Department said Friday. The government urged businesses of all sizes to scan their point-of-sale systems for software known as "Backoff," discovered last October. It previously explained in detail how the software operates and how retailers could find and remove it. Earlier this month, United Parcel Service said it found infected computers in 51 stores. UPS said it was not aware of any fraud that resulted from the infection but said hackers may have...

Apple Inc (AAPL.O) has begun keeping the personal data of some Chinese users on servers in mainland China, marking the first time the tech giant is storing user data on Chinese soil. The storage of user data in China represents a departure from the policies of some technology companies, notably Google Inc (GOOGL.O), which has long refused to build data centers in China due to censorship and privacy concerns. Apple said the move was part of an effort to improve the speed and reliability of its iCloud service, which lets users store pictures, e-mail and other data. Positioning data centers...

Specialized servers used by many ISPs to manage routers and other gateway devices provisioned to their customers are accessible from the Internet and can easily be taken over by attackers, researchers warn. By gaining access to such servers, hackers or intelligence agencies could potentially compromise millions of routers and implicitly the home networks they serve, said Shahar Tal, a security researcher at Check Point Software Technologies. Tal gave a presentation Saturday at the DefCon security conference in Las Vegas. At the core of the problem is an increasingly used protocol known as TR-069 or CWMP (customer-premises equipment wide area network...

How to Use Your Cat to Hack Your Neighbor’s Wi-Fi It appears that wired.com cannot be posted per their copyright complaint. Ignore the clickable link, it only points back to the FR index page... The link has more info... and a few pics. :) http://www.wired.com/2014/08/how-to-use-your-cat-to-hack-your-neighbors-wi-fi/

* TrueNorth is being hailed as the world’s first neurosynaptic computer chip because it can figure things out on its own * Modern processors have 1.4 bn transistors and consume up to 140 watts but the IBM chip contains 5.4 bn transistors and uses just 70 milliwatts * Richard Doherty, the research director of tech research firm Envisioneering Group, hailed IBM's chip as a ‘really big deal’IBM has developed a computer chip which it says will function like a human brain in a giant step forward for artificial intelligence. TrueNorth is being hailed as the world’s first neurosynaptic computer chip...

a South San Francisco resident received a phone call from a man fraudulently posing as a Microsoft Windows employee and asking for personal information on Wednesday, according to police. The suspect, calling himself Mike Johnson, told the resident that her computer had been compromised by a hacker and that he needed access to her computer to conduct a diagnosis. The victim did not provide any personal information to the suspect, according to police. Microsoft said that they do not contact their customers over the phone, nor do they have any records of anyone from the company calling the victim. The...

I'm trying to get Remote Desktop on my home network to work. I have 2 desktops and 2 laptops. One desktop is my main box and I have 4 screens and use it to serve media to my TV over a web box. I have 6 drives on it and it needs lots of maintenance. I can remote each laptop and the other desktop from each other, but I can't access my main box from anywhere. I've done all the help fixes, but no joy yet. I can even access the laptops and other box from my main desktop, but...

Here are 11 sure signs you've been hacked and what to do in the event of compromise. Note that in all cases, the No. 1 recommendation is to completely restore your system to a known good state before proceeding. In the early days, this meant formatting the computer and restoring all programs and data. Today, depending on your operating system, it might simply mean clicking on a Restore button. Either way, a compromised computer can never be fully trusted again. The recovery steps listed in each category below are the recommendations to follow if you don't want to do a...

The IRS can’t say with certainty what happened to the computer hard drive used by Lois Lerner, or exactly where it is now.. On July 11, Judge Reggie Walton ordered the agency to find out what had happened to the hard drive... Manning said Lerner’s hard drive was then “delivered to the IRS Criminal Investigation Division Electronic Crimes Forensic Laboratory for additional efforts to recover data from the malfunctioning hard drive.. testimony revealed another bizarre turn in the saga: The technician, or, specialist, who tried to recover the data from Lerner’s hard drive on that June day in 2011 may...