Did A Hacker OD?

Top hacker Barnaby Jack died from mixing too many drugs in one session, a coroner’s report shows. Kiwi-born Jack was supposed to give a talk at a security conference when he was found dead in his bed.

Conspiracy nuts raised an eyebrow or two when it was revealed that Jack’s death occurred shortly before he was due to demonstrate how heart implants could be hacked at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. He did not have a mark on him and showed no signs of trauma. However, now a coroner’s report has shown that Jack had a mix of heroin, cocaine and prescription drugs in his system. And he died of “acute mixed drug intoxication.”

Jack rose to fame after a 2010 demonstration, in which he hacked a cash machine, making it give out money. Jack’s girlfriend had found him lying in bed unresponsive, with “multiple bottles of beer and champagne” in the rubbish bin, so it must have been a hell of a night.

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Mozilla Delays Touch Browser

Mozilla has again delayed the release date for a touch-enabled version of Firefox that will run in Windows 8′s “Modern” user interface (UI), with the new target in mid-March.

Ship estimates for the browser have been fluid, to put it mildly. In August, the open-source developer pegged December 2013 as the target for the “Metro-ized” version of Firefox. In September, Mozilla said it was hoping to bundle Firefox Metro with the Windows edition of Firefox 27, slated for release on Feb. 4.

Metro was the name Microsoft once applied to the radical UI of Windows 8, but the company ditched the moniker in 2012 over a trademark dispute with a German retailer.

The newest information from Mozilla, however, has tapped March 18, when Firefox 28 is to ship, as the projected release of the browser.

Although a preview of Firefox Metro was bundled with the Aurora build of Firefox more than three months ago — and is currently in Aurora for Firefox 28 — it has not yet been promoted to the next channel, Beta, which is the precursor to Release. Mozilla has set a Jan. 31 deadline for deciding whether the touch browser is ready to add to Firefox 28 Beta.

Mozilla started work on a Metro edition of Firefox in March 2012. It shipped a rough preview in October 2012, several weeks before Microsoft launched Windows 8. At that time, Mozilla’s schedule said the Firefox app might appear as early as January 2013. In May 2013, however, the company said its developers would complete Firefox for Modern between Oct. 2, 2013, and March 20, 2014, with mid-November the likeliest date.

If Mozilla makes the targeted March 18 release, it will have spent two years crafting the browser, which will have shipped 17 months after the retail debut of Windows 8.

Although Mozilla has said it’s important that it have a Metro-ready browser to remain competitive — and Windows 8′s and Windows 8.1′s user share has climbed above the 10% mark– it’s unclear what percentage of those PC and tablet owners spend serious time in the UI, as opposed to the traditional Windows desktop.

Mozilla is also discussing a name for the browser, which was code named “Firefox Metro” during development and later was saddled with the label “Windows 8-style Firefox.”

One suggestion, forwarded by a Mozilla user experience designer, has been “Firefox Touch,” which got nods of approval from others in a Mozilla planning message forum.

“‘Windows 8-style Firefox’ is too long and already doesn’t make perfect sense with Windows 8.1 released, but will make less sense when Windows 9 comes out,” noted Brian Bondy, a Firefox platform engineer who has led the work on the Metro version. “I like Firefox Touch and I think we should go with that. It’s a product designed above all else for touch.”

Some, however, objected to labeling the browser as “Firefox Touch,” pointing out that that would downplay the Android browser Mozilla maintains, which is also touch-enabled.

“I agree with Jim that it should be simply Firefox, and that differentiation happens at the point of download,” countered Peter Scanlon, Mozilla’s acting chief marketing officer, in another message to the same discussion forum.

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Some ATMs Still On XP

Cyber-criminals have been cutting holes into European cash machines in order to infect them with malware.

The holes were cut so that the hackers could plug in USB drives that installed their code onto the ATMs. Details of the attacks on an unnamed European bank’s cash dispensers were presented at the hacker-themed Chaos Computing Congress in Hamburg, Germany.

The thefts came to light in July after the lender involved noticed several its ATMs were being emptied. The bank discovered the criminals were vandalising the machines to use the infected USB sticks. Once the malware had been transferred, they patched the holes up. This allowed the same machines to be targeted several times without the hack being discovered.

The attackers could take the highest value banknotes in order to minimise the amount of time they were exposed. Interestingly the software required the thief to enter a second code in response to numbers shown on the ATM’s screen before they could release the money and the thief could only obtain the right code by phoning another gang member and telling them the numbers displayed. This stopped the criminals going alone.

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LPDDR4 Smartphones Coming Next Year

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A modern phone with 2GB of memory works just fine and since all Android chips and the OS itself support 32-bit mode only, it doesn’t makes much sense to jump over 3.5GB anytime soon.

Still, 64-bit support for Android might be coming after all and Samsung has a solution for people who want more than 3GB on their phone. Samsung has announced the first 8 gigabit (Gb) 4GB RAM module based on low power double data rate 4 (LPDDR4 memory).

It is a 20nm chip and has the lowest energy consumption and higher density to date. Four 8Gb dies combine to offer a single 4GB module we should see them in smartphones and tablets in the near future.

With 3.1 Gbps bandwidth the new LPDDR4 can deliver a 50 percent speed boost over the existing DDR3 and LPDDR3 based chips. Samsung also claims that LPDDR4 will enable a data transfer rate per pin of 3,200 megabits per second (Mbps), which is twice that of the 20nm-class LPDDR3 DRAM.

The Samsung claims that the chip needs 1.1 volts which is 40 percent less than what you would need for 20nm DDR3 chips and mass production starts in 2014.

It is not known when we can expect to see phones and tablets based on LPDDR4 anytime soon, but a dreamer can hope that phones such as Samsung Galaxy S5 might end up using one. After all this should be the next big thing, at least this is what Samsung wants you to believe.

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Will Businesses Accept The Chromebook?

Sales of Chromebooks enjoyed rapid growth,going from basically nothing in 2012 to more than 20 percent of the U.S. commercial PC market, analyst firm NPD reported, while Windows PCs and Macs remained flat at best.

NPD estimated that, throughout all of 2013, 14.4 million desktops, notebooks, and tablets were sold through U.S. commercial channels, typically resellers. That compares to 16.4 million PCs, overall, sold in the U.S. during the third quarter alone–excluding tablets, according to IDC. All told, about 46.2 million PCs have been sold in the U.S. during 2013, IDC found.

Within that segment, however, NPD reported some intriguing findings. Chromebooks, once largely the province of Acer and Samsung, have been embraced by Dell, HP, and others–not the least of which are paying customers. In 2012, Chromebook sales were “negligible,” NPD reported. But in the space of a single year, they climbed to 21 percent, NPD found, helping push overall notebook PC growth up by 28.9 percent.

Windows notebooks, however, contributed nothing to that, as NPD found that growth was flat. Worse still, Macs actually declined, with combined sales of desktops and notebooks falling by 7 percent. Windows tablet sales tripled, albeit off what NPD called “a very small base”.

The message? Businesses are turning to the Web, which Chromebooks almost exclusively run. And those low-cost, Net-focused devices are becoming engines of productivity. As a result, they’re receiving validation from traditional PC vendors including Acer, Asus, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard, plus Google’s own Pixel.

“The market for personal computing devices in commercial markets continues to shift and change,” saidA Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD, in a statement.A “New products like Chromebooks, and reimagined items like Windows tablets, are now supplementing the revitalization that iPads started in personal computing devices. It is no accident that we are seeing the fruits of this change in the commercial markets as business and institutional buyers exploit the flexibility inherent in the new range of choices now open to them.”

Naturally, tablet sales continued to explode, capturing 22 percent(or about 3.16 million units) of all the computing device sales sold through the U.S. channel. Of all tablets sold commercially, iPads dominated with 59 percent of all unit sales, leaving the rest to Android (which grew more than 160 percent) and Windows.

Baker said that diversity will be key to the future success of hardware makers, a signpost for what vendors might release at 2014 and the weeks and months following.

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Is The Tech Industry Going Independent?

The tech industry is undergoing a shift toward a more independent, contingent IT workforce. And while that trend might not be cause for alarm for retiring baby boomer IT professionals, it could mean younger and mid-career workers need to prepare to make a living solo.

About 18% of all IT workers today are self-employed, according to an analysis by Emergent Research, a firm focused on small businesses trends. This independent IT workforce is growing at the rate of about 7% per year, which is faster than the overall growth rate for independent workers generally, at 5.5%.

The definition of independent workers covers people who work at least 15 hours a week.

Steve King, a partner at Emergent, said the growth in independent workers is being driven by companies that want to stay ahead of change, and can bring in workers with the right skills. “In today’s world, change is happening so quickly that everyone is trying to figure out how to be more flexible and agile, cut fixed costs and move to variable costs,” said King. “Unfortunately, people are viewed as a fixed cost.”

King worked with MBO Partners to produce a recent study that estimated the entire independent worker headcount in the U.S., for all occupations, at 17.7 million. They also estimate that around one million of them are IT professionals.

A separate analysis by research firm Computer Economics finds a similar trend. Over the last two years, there has been a spike in the use of contract labor among large IT organizations — firms with IT operational budgets of more than $20 million, according to John Longwell, vice president of research at Computer Economics.

This year, contract workers make up 15% of a typical large organization’s IT staff at the median. This is up from a median of just 6% in 2011, said Longwell. The last time there was a similar increase in contract workers was in 1998, during the dot.com boom and the run-up to Y2K remediation efforts. Computer Economics recently published a research brief on the topic.

“The difference now is that use of contract or temporary workers is not being driven by a boom, but rather by a reluctance to hire permanent workers as the economy improves,” Longwell said.

Computer Economics expects large IT organizations to step up hiring in 2014, which may cause the percentage of contract workers to decline back to a more normal 10% level. But, Longwell cautioned, it’s not clear whether that new hiring will be involve full-time employees or even more contract labor.

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Red Hat Releases Linux E-Beta

Red Hat has made available a beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL 7) for testers, just weeks after the final release of RHEL 6.5 to customers.

RHEL 7 is aimed at meeting the requirements of future applications as well as delivering scalability and performance to power cloud infrastructure and enterprise data centers.

Available to download now, the RHEL 7 beta introduces a number of enhancements, including better support for Linux Containers, in-place upgrades, XFS as the default file system, improved networking support and improved compatibility with Windows networks.

Inviting customers, partners, and members of the public to download the RHEL 7 beta and provide feedback, Red Hat is promoting the upcoming version as its most ambitious release to date. The code is based on Red Hat’s community developed Fedora 19 distribution of Linux and the upstream Linux 3.10 kernel, the firm said.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is designed to provide the underpinning for future application architectures while delivering the flexibility, scalability, and performance needed to deploy across bare metal, virtual machines, and cloud infrastructure,” Senior Product Marketing Manager Kimberly Craven wrote on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux blog.

These improvements address a number of key areas, including virtualisation, management and interoperability.

Linux Containers, for example, was partially supported in RHEL 6.5, but this release enables applications to be created and deployed using Linux Container technology, such as the Docker tool. Containers offers operating system level virtualisation, which provides isolation between applications without the overhead of virtualising the entire server.

Red Hat said it is now supporting an in-place upgrade feature for common server deployment types. This will allow customers to migrate existing RHEL 6.5 systems to RHEL 7 without downtime.

RHEL 7 also makes the switch to XFS as its default file system, supporting file configurations up to 500TB, while ext4 file systems are now supported up to 50TB in size and B-tree file system (btrfs) implementations are available for users to test.

Interoperability with Windows has also been improved, with Red Hat now including the ability to bridge Windows and Linux infrastructure by integrating RHEL 7 and Samba 4.1 with Microsoft Active Directory domains. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Identity Management can also be deployed in a parallel trust zone alongside Active Directory, the firm said.

On the networking side, RHEL 7 provides support for 40Gbps Ethernet, along with improved channel bonding, TCP performance improvements and low latency socket poll support.

Other enhancements include support for very large scale storage configurations, including enterprise storage arrays, and uniform management tools for networking, storage, file systems, identities and security using the OpenLMI framework.

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Did Qualcomm Snub Intel?

Earlier this year Intel made a lot of noise about leasing its foundries to third parties, but at least one big played does not appear to be interested.

Speaking at a tech conference, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs said his company is not interested in using Intel fabs and that it will continue to cooperate with established foundries like TSMC.

Jacobs argued that Intel is great at building huge volumes of equally huge cores, but TSMC is a tad more flexible. He pointed out that foundries like TSMC can run build multiple different products simultaneously, controlling the process using software.
“Intel is famous, has been known for having a copy-exact model, so they need very large volumes of a particular chip to run through that,” Jacobs said, reports ITProPortal.

However, Jacobs did point out that he was glad to hear Intel is joining the foundry space and that it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

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NSA Spies With Tracking Cookies

The browser cookies that online businesses use to track Internet customers for targeted advertising are also used by the National Security Agency to track surveillance targets and break into their systems.

The agency’s use of browser cookies is restricted to tracking specific suspects rather than sifting through vast amounts of user data, theWashington Post reported Tuesday, citing internal documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Google’s PREF (for preference) cookies, which the company uses to personalize webpages for Internet users based on their previous browsing habits and preferences, appears to be a particular favorite of the NSA, the Post noted.

PREF cookies don’t store any user identifying information such as user name or email address. But they contain information on a user’s general location, language preference, search engine settings, number of search results to display per page and other data that lets advertisers uniquely identify an individual’s browser.

The Google cookie, and those used by other online companies, can be used by the NSA to track a target user’s browsing habits and to enable remote exploitation of their computers, the Post said.

Documents made available by Snowden do not describe the specific exploits used by the NSA to break into a surveillance target’s computers. Neither do they say how the NSA gains access to the tracking cookies, the Post reported.

It is theorized that one way the NSA could get access to the tracking cookies is to simply ask the companies for them under the authority granted to the agency by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Separately, the documents leaked by Snowden show that the NSA is also tapping into cell-phone location data gathered and transmitted by makers of mobile applications and operating systems. Google and other Internet companies use the geo-location data transmitted by mobile apps and operating systems to deliver location-aware advertisements and services to mobile users.

However, the NSA is using the same data to track surveillance targets with more precision than was possible with data gathered directly from wireless carriers, the Post noted. The mobile app data, gathered by the NSA under a program codenamed “Happyfoot,” allows the agency to tie Internet addresses to physical locations more precisely than was possible with cell-phone location data.

An NSA division called Tailored Access Operations uses the data gathered from tracking cookies and mobile applications to launch offensive hacking operations against specific target computers, the Post said.

An NSA spokeswoman Wednesday did not comment on the specific details in the Post story but reiterated the agency’s commitment to fulfill its mission of protecting the country against those seeking to do it harm.

“As we’ve said before, NSA, within its lawful mission to collect foreign intelligence to protect the United States, uses intelligence tools to understand the intent of foreign adversaries and prevent them from bringing harm to innocent Americans and allies,” the spokeswoman said.

The Post’s latest revelations are likely to shine a much-needed spotlight on the extensive tracking and monitoring activities carried out by major Internet companies in order to deliver targeted advertisements to users.

Privacy rights groups have protested such tracking for several years and have sought legislation that would give users more visibility and control over the data that is collected on them by online companies.

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Bluetooth 4.1 Goes IPV6

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has announced Bluetooth 4.1, the first version of Bluetooth to lay the foundations for IPV6 capability.

The first hints of what the Bluetooth SIG had planned for this new version were revealed to The INQUIRER in October during our exclusive interview with Steve Hegenderfer at Appsworld. There, he revealed his aspirations for the Bluetooth protocol to become integral to the Internet of Things.

At the front end of Bluetooth 4.1, the biggest change for users is that the retry duration for lost devices has been increased to a full three minutes, so if you wander off with your wireless headphones still on, there’s more of a chance of being able to seamlessly carry on listening upon your return.

Behind the scenes, devices fitted with Bluetooth 4.1 will be able to act as both hub and end point. The advantage of this is that multiple devices can share information between them without going via the host device, so your smartwatch can talk to your heart monitor and send the combined data in a single transmission to your smartphone.

This sort of “pooling” of devices represents an “extranet of things”, and the technology can therefore be applied to a wider area in forming the “Internet of Things” too.

The other major additions are better isolation techniques to ensure that Bluetooth, which broadcasts on an unregulated band, doesn’t interfere either with itself or with signals from other protocols broadcasting at similar frequencies, including WiFi.

The Bluetooth protocol has retained complete backwards compatibility, so a new Bluetooth 4.1 enabled device will work seamlessly with a Bluetooth 1.0 dongle bought in a pound shop.

In addition, Bluetooth 4.0 devices can be Bluetooth 4.1 enabled through patches, so we should see some Bluetooth 4.1 enabled hardware arrive early in 2014.

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