European Union regulator will complete the Yahoo email hack investigation in ‘next couple of weeks’

Image Credit: Yahoo

Yahoo’s European regulator said it is preparing to give the U.S. Internet company the results of an investigation into the 2014 theft of data from 500 million users, including any remedial action to avoid a repeat of the breach. Yahoo said in September last year that hackers had stolen the data in 2014, prompting criticism from U.S. politicians into the delay in notifying customers.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner, the lead European regulator on privacy issues for Yahoo because the company’s European headquarters are in Dublin, told Reuters she would issue the report “in the next couple of weeks”. “We are preparing to serve the final report on Yahoo EMEA Ltd and require of them any remedial actions we have identified,” Helen Dixon said in an interview. It will be up to Yahoo whether to make the report public, she said.

A new EU-wide data protection law coming into force in May 2018 allows fines of up to 4 percent of global turnover. Until then, however, the office of the Data Protection Commissioner said it has no administrative capability to fine a company. A spokesman for Yahoo said it has been cooperating with the commissioner’s office on the investigation and will review the findings carefully when they are available.

Reuters

Publish date: April 12, 2017 12:17 pm| Modified date: April 12, 2017 12:17 pm

Internet providers in US say that they are not going to sell their consumers’ internet browsing history

Representational Image : Reuters

Comcast Corp, Verizon Communications Inc and AT&T Inc said Friday they would not sell customers’ individual internet browsing information, days after the US Congress approved legislation reversing Obama administration era internet privacy rules.

The bill would repeal regulations adopted in October by the Federal Communications Commission under former President Barack Obama requiring internet service providers to do more to protect customers’ privacy than websites like Alphabet Inc’s Google or Facebook Inc . The easing of restrictions has sparked growing anger on social media sites.

“We do not sell our broadband customers’ individual web browsing history. We did not do it before the FCC’s rules were adopted, and we have no plans to do so,” said Gerard Lewis, Comcast’s chief privacy officer. He added Comcast is revising its privacy policy to make more clear that “we do not sell our customers’ individual web browsing information to third parties.”

Verizon does not sell personal web browsing histories and has no plans to do so in the future, said spokesman Richard Young. Verizon privacy officer Karen Zacharia said in a blog post Friday the company has two programs that use customer browsing data. One allows marketers to access “de-identified information to determine which customers fit into groups that advertisers are trying to reach” while the other “provides aggregate insights that might be useful for advertisers and other businesses.”

Republicans in Congress Tuesday narrowly passed the repeal of the rules with no Democratic support and over the objections of privacy advocates. The vote was a win for internet providers such as AT&T Inc, Comcast and Verizon. Websites are governed by a less restrictive set of privacy rules. The White House said Wednesday that President Donald Trump plans to sign the repeal of the rules, which had not taken effect.

Under the rules, internet providers would have needed to obtain consumer consent before using precise geolocation, financial information, health information, children’s information and web browsing history for advertising and marketing. Websites do not need the same affirmative consent. Some in Congress suggested providers would begin selling personal data to the highest bidder, while others vowed to raise money to buy browsing histories of Republicans.

AT&T says in its privacy statement it “will not sell your personal information to anyone, for any purpose. Period.” In a blog post Friday, AT&T said it would not change those policies after Trump signs the repeal. Websites and internet service providers do use and sell aggregated customer data to advertisers. Republicans say the rules unfairly would give websites the ability to harvest more data than internet providers.

Trade group USTelecom CEO Jonathan Spalter said in an op-ed Friday for website Axios that individual “browser history is already being aggregated and sold to advertising networks – by virtually every site you visit on the internet.” This week, 46 Senate Democrats urged Trump not to sign the bill, arguing most Americans “believe that their private information should be just that.”

Reuters

Publish date: April 3, 2017 12:54 pm| Modified date: April 3, 2017 12:55 pm

Nasa is using lasers to build an internet in space for near Earth as well as deep space missions

The LCRD. Image: Nasa.

In a step towards verifying the efficacy of laser communications for speedier data rates for connections between spacecraft and the Earth, Nasa said it is developing a trailblazing, long-term technology demonstration mission. The Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) mission, scheduled for launch in 2019, will help Nasa understand the best ways to operate laser communications systems, the US space agency said in a statement on Wednesday.

They could enable much higher data rates for connections between spacecraft and the Earth, such as scientific data downlink and astronaut communications. “LCRD is the next step in implementing Nasa’s vision of using optical communications for both near-Earth and deep space missions,” said Steve Jurczyk, Associate Administrator of Nasa’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, which leads the LCRD project.

Image: Nasa.

“This technology has the potential to revolutionize space communications, and we are excited to partner with the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate’s Space Communications and Navigation program office, MIT Lincoln Labs and the U.S. Air Force on this effort,” Jurczyk said. Laser communications, also known as optical communications, encodes data onto a beam of light, which is then transmitted between spacecraft and eventually to Earth terminals.

This technology offers data rates that are 10 to 100 times better than current radio-frequency (RF) communications systems. Just as important, laser communication systems can be much smaller than radio systems, allowing the spacecraft communication systems to have lower size, weight and power requirements. Such capability will become critically important as humans embark on long journeys to the moon, Mars and beyond.

A Nasa scientists works on assembling the optical module of the LCRD. Image: Nasa.

“LCRD is designed to operate for many years and will allow Nasa to learn how to optimally use this disruptive new technology,” Don Cornwell of the Space Communications and Navigation programme office at Nasa Headquarters said. “We are also designing a laser terminal for the International Space Station that will use LCRD to relay data from the station to the ground at gigabit-per-second data rates,” Cornwell said.

“We plan to fly this new terminal in 2021, and once tested, we hope that many other Earth-orbiting NASA missions will also fly copies of it to relay their data through LCRD to the ground,” Cornwell added. The LCRD team is led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Partners include NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory.

Publish date: March 23, 2017 2:49 pm| Modified date: March 23, 2017 2:51 pm

Average internet connection speeds up by 26 percent globally

  10 Mar 2017 , 11:28

Global average internet connection speed has increased 12 percent to 7.0Mbps in the fourth quarter of 2016 — a 26 percent increase year-over-year, a new report said on Thursday.

According to the “2016 State of the Internet Report” by global leader in content delivery network (CDN) services Akamai Technologies, South Korea again had the highest average connection speed globally at 26.1Mbps in the fourth quarter.

On the average internet speed in India, the report says that the country made rapid strides on this front. The fourth quarter of 2016 saw internet speeds rising to 5.6Mbps, up from 4.1Mbps last quarter. However despite the major jump India continues to remain at the bottom.

Globally, the internet connection speeds continued to show positive long-term trends around the world, with particularly strong year-over-year increases across all broadband adoption metrics as per the report.

“When Akamai first published the report in 2008, we defined ‘high broadband’ as 5Mbps and above, which nine years ago had an adoption rate of 16% globally. We’re now seeing a 15Mbps adoption rate of 25 percent worldwide,” said David Belson, editor of the report.

The report provided insight into key global statistics such as connection speeds, broadband adoption metrics and notable internet disruptions, among others.

At 26.7 Mbps, the district of Columbia led the United States in average connection speed.

Global 4, 10, 15 and 25Mbps broadband adoption rates increased 15 percent, 31 percent, 37 percent and 45 percent year over year, respectively.

IANS

Total number of internet domain names jumps to 329.3 million in fourth quarter of 2016

Image Credit: Hewlett Packard Enterprise

  01 Mar 2017 , 19:09

Nearly 2.3 million domain name registrations were added to the internet in the fourth quarter of 2016, bringing the total number of domain name registrations to 329.3 million, a new report revealed on Wednesday.

According to VeriSign, a global leader in domain names and internet security, the total number of domain name registrations are across all top-level domains (TLDs), as of December 31 last year.

“The increase of approximately 2.3 million domain name registrations globally equates to a growth rate of 1.8 percent over the third quarter of 2016. Domain name registrations have grown by 21 million, or 6.8 percent, year over year,” the report titled ‘Domain Name Industry Brief’ said.

The .com and .net TLDs had a combined total of approximately 142.2 million domain name registrations in the domain name base in the fourth quarter of 2016. This represents a 1.7 percent increase year over year.

“As of December 31, the .com domain name base equaled 126.9 million domain name registrations, while the .net domain name base equaled 15.3 million domain name registrations,” the report added.

New .com and .net domain name registrations totaled 8.8 million during the fourth quarter of 2016. In the fourth quarter of 2015, new .com and .net domain name registrations totaled 12.2 million.

During the fourth quarter of 2016, Verisign’s average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load was approximately 143 billion queries per day across all TLDs operated by Verisign, with a peak of nearly 398 billion queries.

Surfing internet, excess use of social media networks like Facebook can make you lose track of time

Image: Reuters

  09 Feb 2017 , 15:58

Facebook addicts, take note! Using the social networking site or surfing the web may impair your perception of time, warn researchers including one of Indian-origin. Using well-established internal clock models, researchers attempted to separate the roles of ‘attention’ and ‘arousal’ as drivers for time distortion. They found that Facebook-related stimuli can lead to an underestimate of time compared to general internet use, but that both lead to a distortion of time.

In the study, Lazaros Gonidis and Dinkar Sharma from the University of Kent in the UK monitored the responses of 44 people who were shown 20 images for varying amounts of time. Five of the images were associated with Facebook, five had more general internet associations with another ten as neutral ‘control’ images. Those taking part had to say whether the image they had just seen had been visible for a short or long time.

The key finding was that people tended to underestimate the time they had been looking at Facebook-related images to a greater extent than other more general internet related images, but that in both cases time was underestimated. This suggests that Facebook-related images affect time by changing how we pay attention to them. The findings are likely to have implications for future study into addictive behaviour. The study was published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

PTI

Donald Trump is proof that a free, uncensored internet isn’t always the best internet

Image: Reuters

By Anirudh Regidi /  14 Nov 2016 , 13:46

To a great many in the world, even more so in America, it’s hard to stomach the fact that Donald Trump will soon be the most powerful man on the planet. But why didn’t we see him coming?

I’m not alone in thinking that the world saw him as a joke. Every talk show host and comedian I follow went out of his way to make fun of Trump, almost everyone who was anyone in the tech world decried his policies and most news media made mincemeat of the man.

As far as I was concerned, Trump was the most unsuitable candidate the world had ever seen, and yet he won.

And why wouldn’t I have that opinion of him? Everywhere I turned, all I saw were jokes and memes and not one person I knew took him seriously. How could such a man be president?

The keyword here is “follow”. The internet democratised content. News is no longer the dominion of professionals and everyone has a voice, be they demagogues, brilliant physicists or your average Joe.

I’m not going to waste my time following someone or something I don’t care about. I “like” pages that I find interesting, I watch YouTube videos that I enjoy and I spend hours perusing through subreddits that I find fascinating.

My little cloud of preferences follows me around everywhere I go. It’s on my phone, on my laptop and every other electronic device I sign in to.

Thanks to that cloud, I’m completely oblivious to the happenings in the rest of the world — ask me something on Bollywood movies and I’ll be utterly clueless.

Have you ever tried browsing Facebook or YouTube in incognito mode? You’ll see a different world out there.

With Donald Trump, this is exactly what happened. It’s hard to take an unbiased view of the world when you’re curating that view yourself. Many of you saw what I did — the jokes, the memes and the racism. A great many more (enough to vote him in) saw Trump as the saviour of the American people, an honest man just speaking his mind, Crooked Hillary.

Trump’s followers had their own little self-curated cloud around them, as, in all likelihood, does Trump himself. You wouldn’t be denying climate change or vaccination or the moon landings, or even Trump, if you were open to all the facts.

The best, unbiased view of the elections came courtesy of an AI and it predicted Trump’s win in October.

Hitler did the same thing when he rose to power. He played on the minds of the suffering German people, promised them greatness and wealth and power, and he did all this with the power of radio.

As Timeline explains in this lovely article, “Radio was a much cheaper propaganda tool than the printing press. Hitler could reach Germans with his deranged ramblings — without radios or middlemen getting in the way.” Isn’t social media just an evolution of the same?

Stop blaming Facebook, Google and everyone else for showing biased content. Trump is on all of us.

In-flight Wi-Fi in India to be delayed indefinitely by “spurious” security concerns and red tape

By tech2 News Staff /  12 Dec 2016 , 14:48

Wi-Fi over the skies of India will remain a pipe-dream for now. In August, Civil Aviation Secretary Rajeev Chaubey had stated that we can expect to see in-flight Wi-Fi “in the next 10 days.” It’s now December.

A report on The Wall Street Journal reveals that the plans for in-flight Wi-Fi in India will remain banned, pending approval from the “communications ministry.” The Home Ministry has reportedly been opposed to the plan, citing security concerns.

As it stands today, any commercial passenger aircraft is required to disable in-flight Wi-Fi access when flying over Indian airspace. This includes international flights.

As Mashable points out, airlines such as Jet Airways already have approval from the Federal Aviation Authority and other regulatory bodies. Even our neighbours, Pakistan and China included, already allow in-flight Wi-Fi.

International flight safety norms are quite stringent and it’s hard to see what’s worrying the Home Ministry so. Mashable also adds that aviation technology specialists have dismissed these security concerns as “spurious”.

In fact, one can easily make the case that free Wi-Fi at railway stations is a far greater cause for concern than in-flight Wi-Fi in a closed, isolated environment 36,000 feet above the ground.

With this push for Digital India, demonetisation pushing the country to digital transactions and myriad such future-looking plans, it’s hard to believe that the fastest, most modern system of transportation is still held back in such a way.

Hackers can hack any Visa credit card or debit card in six seconds

Visa credit hacked

02 Dec 2016 , 14:50


It can take hackers just six seconds, a laptop and an internet connection to hack any Visa credit or debit card, new research has revealed. The research, published in the journal “IEEE Security and Privacy”, said that the “distributed guessing attack” circumvents all the security features put in place to protect online payments from fraud. Neither the network, nor the banks are able to detect attackers making multiple, invalid attempts to get payment card data.

The current online payment system does not detect multiple invalid payment requests from different websites. This allows unlimited guesses on each card data field, using up to the allowed number of attempts – typically 10 or 20 guesses – on each website, explained Mohammed Ali, a PhD student in Newcastle University.

“Different websites ask for different variations in the card data fields to validate an online purchase. “This means it’s quite easy to build up the information and piece it together like a jigsaw,” Ali added. The combination of these two factors — unlimited guesses and variation in the payment data fields — makes it easy for attackers to hack all the card details.

Each generated card field can be used in succession to generate the next field and so on. “If the hits are spread across enough websites then a positive response to each question can be received within two seconds – just like any online payment,” Ali warned.

The researchers explained that even starting with no details at all other than the first six digits — which tell you the bank and card type — a hacker can obtain essential pieces of information. These are — card number, expiry date and security code — to make an online purchase within as little as six seconds. Researchers believe this ‘guessing attack’ method could have been used in the recent Tesco cyber attack where the hackers defrauded customers of 2.5 million pounds.

The risk is higher at this time of the year as many people are making online purchases ahead of Christmas. However, researchers found that unlike Visa cards, MasterCard’s centralised network was able to detect the guessing attack after less than 10 attempts – even when those payments were distributed across multiple networks.

The researchers suggested that to minimise the chances of hacking, card-holders should use just one card for online payments and keep the spending limit on that account as low as possible. “If it’s a bank card then keep ready funds to a minimum and transfer over money as you need it,” said Martin Emms, co-author of the research.

IANS

Nissan to use big data to alert users about maintenance of the upcoming connected cars

Image: MirrorLink

  30 Nov 2016 , 17:45

Nissan Motor Co will make its first major foray into internet-connected cars by offering an option in some new vehicles that will use big data technology to notify drivers when vehicle maintenance is required. As automakers compete fiercely to develop self-driving cars and improve the customer experience inside vehicles, Japan’s second-largest car maker said on Tuesday it will begin rolling out the service in Japan and India in 2017, followed by other countries through 2020.

With the availability of new mobility options including ride-hailing and car-sharing services threatening to cool demand for individual car ownership, automakers are looking for new ways to attract loyal drivers. Toyota Motor Corp, Japan’s biggest car maker, announced earlier this month that it will have a similar alerting feature in the domestic version of the upcoming Prius plug-in model.

And Ford Motor Co last month announced that by year’s end, some of its models will be able to communicate with smart home devices using Amazon’s Alexa voice service. Nissan said that it would also market the device required to access the service, which can be retrofitted into existing models. In the future, 30 percent of its existing vehicles would eventually be equipped with the hardware, it said.

The new service will be enabled by a telematics control unit which will enable the automaker and its dealer network to access information about the car’s diagnostics and location, alerting the driver to any required maintenance work. “With connectivity we can provide better information and better service offerings to our customers,” Kent O’Hara, Nissan corporate vice president and head of its global aftersales division, told reporters at a briefing.

“We’ll know what’s wrong with that vehicle, we’ll know where the vehicle is, we’ll know what parts are needed for the vehicle … and we can provide convenient service and alternative transportation options.” He added that connectivity services and other new technologies would contribute 25 percent of the automaker’s aftersales revenues by 2022, from “low, single digits” at the moment.

Aftersales generally account for around 14 percent of automaker revenues, according to industry experts. O’Hara said that connectivity services would enable Nissan to “enjoy some growth in our retention of customers over what we experience today”. Nissan declined to offer pricing details on the device, but the company is focusing on marketing new technology in mass-market models. Many automakers often reserve sophisticated services and functions to higher-end models.

Earlier this year, Nissan launched a minivan in Japan which can self-drive on single-lane motorways and navigate congestion, while this month it launched its new gasoline-electric hybrid powertrain in its Note subcompact car for the Japanese market.

Reuters

Trai needs to move beyond 512kbps, and overcome FUP and QoS barriers

Representational Image : Reuters

By Nimish Sawant /  03 Nov 2016 , 17:15

Trai released a directive which mandates all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to ensure that customers get a minimum download speed of 512Kbps, even after the fair usage policy (FUP) limit is up. Mind you, this is not an update to the minimum broadband speed, which is still 512Kbps, according to a July 2013 order.

TRAI Direction 31102016 BBPA by Tech2 on Scribd

Yes. I too did a double take when I read ‘kilobits per second’ and ‘minimum download speed’ in the same line. In 2016. The directive to ensure ISPs and TSPs inform users via SMS or email, when their data limit reaches 50, 90 and 100 percent, is laudable. But having an unlimited plan with an unreliable 512kbps speed hardly serves any purpose. The talks of raising the minimum broadband speed to 2 Mbps has still not gone anywhere.

For a country with the second largest number of Internet users, internet speeds are still being measured in kilobits per second in 2016.

India is second largest internet consumer in APAC region, but has the lowest speeds. Figures indicate millions of users (Image: Statista)

FUP in India is a joke

Let’s get one thing out of the way. FUP limits in India are a joke. FUP, that dreaded policy which lets ISPs and TSPs either cut off or downgrade your internet speeds after you have crossed a certain data limit ceiling, is universally hated and more so in India.

This means, that my ‘Unlimited’ 2Mbps plan will switch to 512Kbps after I have exhausted 16GB data within a month. Despite Trai’s paper on transparency surrounding FUP limits, a lot of ISPs still continue to