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Atari Online News, Etc. Volume 17 Issue 30
Volume 17, Issue 30 Atari Online News, Etc. August 14, 2015
Published and Copyright (c) 1999 - 2015
All Rights Reserved
Atari Online News, Etc.
A-ONE Online Magazine
Dana P. Jacobson, Publisher/Managing Editor
Joseph Mirando, Managing Editor
Rob Mahlert, Associate Editor
Atari Online News, Etc. Staff
Dana P. Jacobson -- Editor
Joe Mirando -- "People Are Talking"
Michael Burkley -- "Unabashed Atariophile"
Albert Dayes -- "CC: Classic Chips"
Rob Mahlert -- Web site
Thomas J. Andrews -- "Keeper of the Flame"
With Contributions by:
Fred Horvat
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A-ONE #1730 09/29/06
~ Firebee Update, cont. ~ People Are Talking! ~ Apple Squashes Bug!
~ Lenovo Gave Us Crapware ~ Intel Processor Flaw! ~ Intern Hacks Facebook!
~ Kapersky Faked Malware! ~ Destiny’s Best Weapon! ~ Run Win 10 on Mac!
~ ~ “Haha” Has Killed LOL! ~
-* Resident Evil 2 Gets Remake *-
-* Microsoft (Ab)used Personal Data! *-
-* Link Between Violent Games and Aggression *-
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->From the Editor's Keyboard "Saying it like it is!"
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First off, apologies to those who usually read each week’s web version issue online, or
download it to read later. In my attempt to rush last week’s issue out the door, I forgot
to post the updated issue and appropriate links. I remembered that I hadn’t done so later in
the week but just didn’t have the time to produce and make them available!
Fast forward to this week’s issue, and more troubles! I went to power up my PC to work on
the issue this week, but the machine wouldn’t turn on. For the record, I usually leave my
PC on all the time, but last week I shut it down. All of my A-ONE templates and whatever
articles I’ve accumulated during the week are on that machine. Sure, I have a back-up of most
of that stuff on my Mac and a flashcard, but I rely on the PC to put everything together; and
then I bring everything over to the Mac for posting and mailing! At the moment, I’m not sure
how I’m going to create my web versions/pages because I rely on an ancient version of
Netscape’s Composer to create those pages. Now I’ll have to see if there’s a Mac version of
Composer floating around on the web, or try to find something comparable. So, if you’re
looking for the web versions, you may not find them again this week! Sorry!
So, here we are with a “shortened” version of the magazine because I “lost” a number of
articles that I saved up for future use; and had planned for this week! The best laid
plans… Creating this week’s issue on the Mac, I’m driving blind! I have no idea how this
issue is going to look to you - how it will end up being formatted and whatever. On the PC,
I have everything set up in an 80-column design using WordPad and NotePad; but on the Mac,
I’m using TextEdit and NotePad. Hopefully, there won’t be much difference in how you see
your copy of this week’s issue. And even more importantly, I hope I either get things
resolved with the PC or be able to find comparable programs on the Mac to make this
“conversion” as seamless as possible! I truly hate surprises like these!
Until next time…
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Firebee Update, continued
Last submission I was discussing the issues I was going through with the keyboard, 10MB Hub and the video resolution. After E-mailing Mathias Wittau about the monitor I switch monitors again to a Dell 15 inch LCD that had DVI connection so I didn’t have to use a DVI to VGA adapter. I hooked that up and turned the unit on. This time the FireBee didn’t boot into MiNT but into a TOS Boot Menu asking if I wanted TOS for MiNT, EmuTOS, or Plain TOS. I chose TOS for MiNT and got only a standard TOS Desktop. So I shut down and tried again and the same thing occurred. At this point I realized that maybe my Boot Drive C: was corrupt and could no longer boot into MiNT. This is the 16GB Compact Flash (CF) card inside the FireBee.
I opened the FireBee and removed the CF Card. I have a CF Card reader built into a Windows Vista PC, but Windows does not allow you to create more than a single partition when working with CF Cards. I did insert the CF card into that PC and Windows could not recognize the CF Card. At that point I realized I needed another CF Card Reader. I went to a local computer store and purchased an IDE to CF Card reader for $14. I was hoping for a USB to CF Reader but those were $60 and more. I have an old PIII computer that I have various hard drives that I swap in and out depending on what the project is. I put in the Linux hard drive and disconnected the CD-ROM drive and attached the CF Card Reader to the CD-ROM IDE cable and attached power. I booted the PC with the CF Card attached. (Unfortunately when writing this article I could not find the English version of setting up the CF card in time so here’s the German page:
http://wiki.newtosworld.de/FireBeeCFTutorial. (You can always translate the German to English and read further if desired.) Under Linux it states to use the GPARTED command. My install of Lubuntu did not have GPARTED installed. No big deal I would just go to the software manager and install it. Unfortunately my install of Lubuntu was too old for any new software to be installed. So I went to another machine to download the latest Lubuntu 15.04 http://lubuntu.net/ Once that was done I burned the ISO to DVD and installed that to the PC. Then I could get GPARTED installed. Now I can finally see the state of what is on the CF Card. The CF card appears to be corrupted and showing nothing at all. At this point I decided to purchase a new CF Card and leave the original intact to maybe try and figure out what happened to it. I purchased a 8GB CF card from a local retailer and attached that to the PC and booted into Linux. Basically what the Tutorial states is that with the CF Card you want a minimum of two partitions with the first being made bootable. Also the First partition should be 2GB or smaller and FAT16 with the second being FAT32 or EXT2. I made the first partition FAT 16 990MB and the remainder of the CF Card the second partition FAT32. I made the first partition bootable and shut down. Then I went to http://atari.nvg.org/firebee-mint/ and downloaded the FreeMiNT setup for the FireBee and the updates and followed the instructions as stated on the Web Site. I did these from the Windows Vista PC since now that the CF Card was already prepared the Windows PC was able to work with the CF Card without issue. Plus I am more familiar with Windows and the PC was far faster than the PIII is was running Linux on. After all this effort I installed the freshly prepared CF Card into the FireBee and turn it on. After the TOS Boot Menu I select TOS for MiNT and Success, The FireBee booted into FreeMint! I set the video resolution to 1024x768x32bit and explored what was on the Drives C: and D:.
After much speculation on what caused the original CF Card to become corrupted I am 95% sure that the card is defective. I contacted the manufacturer and they agreed from what trouble shooting I did that the card appeared to be defective to them also. I will be sending the card back to the manufacturer for a replacement this week. Yes all this effort appears to have been a lot of hassle but to me I learned a whole lot about the FireBee and setting MiNT up. Once running I went and purchased another 8GB CF Card and made a backup of the working card as I had started installing software to the card. Then after major changes I will copy the working card to the backup card in case something happens I can recover much faster.
Lastly any USA Atari Enthusiast who wish to give my FireBee a test drive I will be at the ACEC Swap Meet August 29, 2015 in Columbus Ohio. Information on the club and show is here http://www.angelfire.com/oh4/acec/acec.html I will have the FireBee setup for users to try out and I will answer any questions the best I can. I will also have my Raspberry Pi running Hatari and Aranym for those who want to see that in action too.
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->In This Week's Gaming Section - Resident Evil 2 Getting Remake!
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" Destiny’s Best Weapon Is On Sale This Weekend!
Link Between Violent Games and Aggression!
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->A-ONE's Game Console Industry News - The Latest Gaming News!
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One of the Best Video Games of the ’90s is Getting A Remake
Resident Evil 2, the classic survivalist horror video game, is making a comeback, Capcom announced Wednesday.
The details are hazy at this point, but the remake is being led by Yoshiaki Hirabayashi under Capcom’s R&D Division 1. Hirabayashi also headed up Capcom’s relaunch of original Resident Evil, which came out this year.
Capcom made the announcement in a video on its website.
“Fans have been asking for an RE2 remake for years now, and we’re happy to finally confirm one is coming,” the company wrote in the blog announcement. “However, as [Hirabayashi] mentions in the video, you’re learning this news practically as fast as it happens, so further updates may take some time. Game development is a long process and the team wants to deliver a remake that lives up to expectations.”
Gamers Rejoice: Destiny’s Best Weapon Is On Sale This Weekend
The day has finally come. Xûr, the exotic weapon and armor salesman in Destiny, is selling Gjallarhorn. For those of you who missed purchasing Ice Breaker from Xûr when it was first on sale—you know, back when strange coins were still strange and not slowly accumulating into the hundreds in your vault — try not to miss the boat on this one.
For 17 strange coins you’ll have the opportunity to buy at least several to make up for its absence from your inventory–and Crota hard-mode runs–for the past few months. Unless you already had one, then continue in your apathy.
Now while this may appear to come as literally the best thing ever, we should reserve that feeling of extraordinary bliss. In the Update Preview released by Bungie on July 16, they stated the intention to nerf Gjallarhorn’s Wolfpack Rounds. So for those of us who never had it, at least we’ll get one that’s not as good.
The reason for nerfing it? Apparently everyone was using it and “was so strong that for many people it had become the only answer to getting through tough encounters.” Who knew?
Additionally citing that they “strive for Destiny to be a place where a single weapon or strategy does not dictate how, or with whom, you spend your time.” (Maybe if DLCs — okay, every level in the game — weren’t just the same maps run in reverse I’d be inclined to agree with that assessment.)
So at least now while you’re waiting on your 8-second Ice Breaker cool downs (also to be in the new patch), now you have some time to admire the five Gjallarhorns in your inventory you just bought.
American Psychological Association Affirms Link Between Violent Games and Aggression
Playing violent video games is linked to increases in aggression and decreases in sensitivity to aggression, according to a review by the American Psychological Association (APA) of recent research. The review indicated that there is "insufficient evidence" about whether playing violent video games can also lead to criminal violence or delinquency, the APA announced today.
The review comes in a 49-page report from the APA Task Force on Violent Media, which the APA established in January 2013 to review scientific literature published between 2005 and 2013 about the effects of violent video games.
"The research demonstrates a consistent relation between violent video game use and increases in aggressive behavior, aggressive cognitions and aggressive affect, and decreases in prosocial behavior, empathy and sensitivity to aggression," the report concludes. The Entertainment Software Association refuted the report in a statement to Polygon, pointing out that the Supreme Court previously dismissed the supposed link.
Researchers express concerns about APA Task Force on Violent Media
There isn't enough evidence of a potential link between playing violent games and committing acts of criminal violence, according to the report, because "very limited research" exists on that topic, said Mark Appelbaum, PhD, chair of the APA Task Force, in a press release.
The report notes that "no single risk factor consistently leads a person to act aggressively or violently. Rather, it is the accumulation of risk factors that tends to lead to aggressive or violent behavior." Playing violent video games is one such risk factor, the report says.
Based on the report, the APA has adopted a new set of policies and recommendations that replaces its 2005 "Resolution on Violence in Video Games and Interactive Media."
In the new document, simply called "Resolution on Violent Video Games," the APA "strongly encourages" the ESRB to update its video game rating system "to reflect the levels and characteristics of violence in games, in addition to the current global ratings." The APA will also endorse the development of "rigorously tested interventions" that educate children and families about the effects of playing violent games, and will support further research into the field.
Additional research is necessary to fill gaps in knowledge of the consequences of playing violent video games, according to the report. The APA Task Force identified limitations of the existing body of research such as the effects of playing violent games on children under the age of 10 — most studies have focused on adolescents and adults — and whether the effects differ between male and female individuals.
Appelbaum acknowledged "some variation among the individual studies," but said that "a strong and consistent general pattern has emerged from many years of research that provides confidence in our general conclusions."
But the Entertainment Software Association, the trade body representing the U.S. video game industry, disagrees with the APA Task Force's report. The organization slammed the report in a statement to Polygon, saying, "Considering the APA's long-standing bias against and attacks on video games, this slanted report is not surprising. Numerous medical professionals, researchers, and courts all debunk the fundamental thesis of their argument."
The ESA went on to cite the Supreme Court's opinion in Brown v. EMA, the 2011 case in which the court decided a California law that banned the sale of violent video games to minors was unconstitutional.
Practicing immoral behavior in a game may make you more morally sensitive, study says "In tearing down similar faulty research, the U.S. Supreme Court specifically ruled that 'psychological studies purporting to show a connection between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children do not prove that such exposure causes minors to act aggressively.' We could not state it better," the ESA said.
Regarding the ESA's charges of a "long-standing bias" against video games at the APA, it's worth examining the APA Task Force on Violent Media more closely.
The APA Task Force was created in January 2013, the same month President Barack Obama suggested further research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into the potential links between video games, "media images" and violence. That call to action followed the December 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in which 20 students and six adult staff members were killed.
In September 2013, a group of nearly 230 academics, researchers and psychologists signed a letter expressing concerns about the APA Task Force's review process. The APA's original 2005 resolution came to "several strong conclusions on the basis of inconsistent or weak evidence," according to the signatories of the letter. They continued, "Research subsequent to that 2005 statement has provided even stronger evidence that some of the assertions in it cannot be supported."
Two of the seven members of the APA Task Force, Kenneth Dodge, PhD and Sherry Hamby, PhD, endorsed an amicus curiae brief submitted in favor of upholding the California law in the Brown v. EMA case. The brief came from now-disgraced California state Sen. Leland Yee, a well-known crusader against violent video games.
The APA Task Force's review also doesn't include the latest research on violent video games, since the Task Force only examined studies published until mid-2013. A 2014 study led by Matthew Grizzard at the University at Buffalo indicated that practicing immoral behavior in a virtual environment — such as killing someone in a violent video game — could actually lead to an increase in prosocial behavior. Contrary to the APA Task Force's report, Grizzard's research found that players would become more sensitive to the moral codes they were violating in the game.
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A-ONE's Headline News
The Latest in Computer Technology News
Compiled by: Dana P. Jacobson
Russian Antivirus Firm Faked Malware To Harm Rivals
Beginning more than a decade ago, one of the largest security companies in the world, Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, tried to damage rivals in the marketplace by tricking their antivirus software programs into classifying benign files as malicious, according to two former employees.
They said the secret campaign targeted Microsoft Corp , AVG Technologies NV , Avast Software and other rivals, fooling some of them into deleting or disabling important files on their customers' PCs.
Some of the attacks were ordered by Kaspersky Lab's co-founder, Eugene Kaspersky, in part to retaliate against smaller rivals that he felt were aping his software instead of developing their own technology, they said.
"Eugene considered this stealing," said one of the former employees. Both sources requested anonymity and said they were among a small group of people who knew about the operation.
Kaspersky Lab strongly denied that it had tricked competitors into categorizing clean files as malicious, so-called false positives.
"Our company has never conducted any secret campaign to trick competitors into generating false positives to damage their market standing," Kaspersky said in a statement to Reuters. "Such actions are unethical, dishonest and their legality is at least questionable."
Executives at Microsoft, AVG and Avast previously told Reuters that unknown parties had tried to induce false positives in recent years. When contacted this week, they had no comment on the allegation that Kaspersky Lab had targeted them.
The Russian company is one of the most popular antivirus software makers, boasting 400 million users and 270,000 corporate clients. Kaspersky has won wide respect in the industry for its research on sophisticated Western spying programs and the Stuxnet computer worm that sabotaged Iran's nuclear program in 2009 and 2010.
The two former Kaspersky Lab employees said the desire to build market share also factored into Kaspersky's selection of competitors to sabotage.
"It was decided to provide some problems" for rivals, said one ex-employee. "It is not only damaging for a competing company but also damaging for users' computers."
The former Kaspersky employees said company researchers were assigned to work for weeks or months at a time on the sabotage projects.
Their chief task was to reverse-engineer competitors' virus detection software to figure out how to fool them into flagging good files as malicious, the former employees said.
The opportunity for such trickery has increased over the past decade and a half as the soaring number of harmful computer programs have prompted security companies to share more information with each other, industry experts said. They licensed each other's virus-detection engines, swapped samples of malware, and sent suspicious files to third-party aggregators such as Google Inc's VirusTotal.
By sharing all this data, security companies could more quickly identify new viruses and other malicious content. But the collaboration also allowed companies to borrow heavily from each other's work instead of finding bad files on their own.
Kaspersky Lab in 2010 complained openly about copycats, calling for greater respect for intellectual property as data-sharing became more prevalent.
In an effort to prove that other companies were ripping off its work, Kaspersky said it ran an experiment: It created 10 harmless files and told VirusTotal that it regarded them as malicious. VirusTotal aggregates information on suspicious files and shares them with security companies.
Within a week and a half, all 10 files were declared dangerous by as many as 14 security companies that had blindly followed Kaspersky's lead, according to a media presentation given by senior Kaspersky analyst Magnus Kalkuhl in Moscow in January 2010.
When Kaspersky's complaints did not lead to significant change, the former employees said, it stepped up the sabotage.
In one technique, Kaspersky's engineers would take an important piece of software commonly found in PCs and inject bad code into it so that the file looked like it was infected, the ex-employees said. They would send the doctored file anonymously to VirusTotal.
Then, when competitors ran this doctored file through their virus detection engines, the file would be flagged as potentially malicious. If the doctored file looked close enough to the original, Kaspersky could fool rival companies into thinking the clean file was problematic as well.
VirusTotal had no immediate comment.
In its response to written questions from Reuters, Kaspersky denied using this technique. It said it too had been a victim of such an attack in November 2012, when an "unknown third party" manipulated Kaspersky into misclassifying files from Tencent <0700.HK>, Mail.ru and the Steam gaming platform as malicious.
The extent of the damage from such attacks is hard to assess because antivirus software can throw off false positives for a variety of reasons, and many incidents get caught after a small number of customers are affected, security executives said.
The former Kaspersky employees said Microsoft was one of the rivals that were targeted because many smaller security companies followed the Redmond, Washington-based company's lead in detecting malicious files. They declined to give a detailed account of any specific attack.
Microsoft's antimalware research director, Dennis Batchelder, told Reuters in April that he recalled a time in March 2013 when many customers called to complain that a printer code had been deemed dangerous by its antivirus program and placed in "quarantine."
Batchelder said it took him roughly six hours to figure out that the printer code looked a lot like another piece of code that Microsoft had previously ruled malicious. Someone had taken a legitimate file and jammed a wad of bad code into it, he said. Because the normal printer code looked so much like the altered code, the antivirus program quarantined that as well.
Over the next few months, Batchelder's team found hundreds, and eventually thousands, of good files that had been altered to look bad. Batchelder told his staff not to try to identify the culprit.
"It doesn't really matter who it was," he said. "All of us in the industry had a vulnerability, in that our systems were based on trust. We wanted to get that fixed."
In a subsequent interview on Wednesday, Batchelder declined to comment on any role Kaspersky may have played in the 2013 printer code problems or any other attacks. Reuters has no evidence linking Kaspersky to the printer code attack.
Eugene Kaspersky, chairman and CEO of Kaspersky Lab, listens to a question during an interview in New York
As word spread in the security industry about the induced false positives found by Microsoft, other companies said they tried to figure out what went wrong in their own systems and what to do differently, but no one identified those responsible.
At Avast, a largely free antivirus software maker with the biggest market share in many European and South American countries, employees found a large range of doctored network drivers, duplicated for different language versions.
Avast Chief Operating Officer Ondrej Vlcek told Reuters in April that he suspected the offenders were well-equipped malware writers and "wanted to have some fun" at the industry's expense. He did not respond to a request on Thursday for comment on the allegation that Kaspersky had induced false positives.
The former employees said Kaspersky Lab manipulated false positives off and on for more than 10 years, with the peak period between 2009 and 2013.
It is not clear if the attacks have ended, though security executives say false positives are much less of a problem today.
That is in part because security companies have grown less likely to accept a competitor's determinations as gospel and are spending more to weed out false positives.
AVG's former chief technology officer, Yuval Ben-Itzhak, said the company suffered from troves of bad samples that stopped after it set up special filters to screen for them and improved its detection engine.
"There were several waves of these samples, usually four times per year. This crippled-sample generation lasted for about four years. The last wave was received at the beginning of the year 2013," he told Reuters in April.
AVG's chief strategy officer, Todd Simpson, declined to comment on Wednesday.
Kaspersky said it had also improved its algorithms to defend against false virus samples. It added that it believed no antivirus company conducted the attacks "as it would have a very bad effect on the whole industry."
"Although the security market is very competitive, trusted threat-data exchange is definitely part of the overall security of the entire IT ecosystem, and this exchange must not be compromised or corrupted," Kaspersky said.
Lenovo Used Windows Anti-theft Feature To Install Persistent Crapware
Windows 8 and Windows 10 contain a surprising feature that many users will find unwelcome: PC OEMs can embed a Windows executable in their system firmware. Windows 8 and 10 will then extract this executable during boot time and run it automatically. In this way, the OEM can inject software onto a Windows machine even if the operating system was cleanly installed.
The good news is that most OEMs fortunately do not seem to take advantage of this feature. The bad news is that "most" is not "all." Between October 2014 and April of this year, Lenovo used this feature to preinstall software onto certain Lenovo desktop and laptop systems, calling the feature the "Lenovo Service Engine."
Lenovo's own description of what the software did differs depending on whether the affected system is a desktop or a laptop. On desktops, the company claims that the software only sends some basic information (the system model, region, date, and a system ID) to a Lenovo server. This doesn't include any personally identifying information, but the system ID should be unique to each device. Lenovo says that this is a one-time operation and that the information gets sent only on a machine's first connection to the Internet.
For laptops, however, the software does rather more. LSE on laptops installs the OneKey Optimizer (OKO) software that Lenovo bundles on many of its machines. OneKey Optimizer arguably falls into the "crapware" category. While OKO does do some somewhat useful system maintenance—it can update drivers, for example — it also offers to perform performance "optimizations" and cleaning "system junk files," which both seem to be of dubious value.
Making this rather worse is that LSE and/or OKO appear to be insecure. Security issues, including buffer overflows and insecure network connections, were reported to Lenovo and Microsoft by researcher Roel Schouwenberg in April. In response, Lenovo has stopped including LSE on new systems (the company says that systems built since June should be clean). It has provided firmware updates for affected laptops and issued instructions on how to disable the option on desktops and clean up the LSE files.
The issue was spotted by a poster on our own forums. That poster described some even more undesirable behavior on Windows 7 systems. On those machines, it appears that LSE replaces a Windows system file, autochk.exe (which is used for the boot-time chkdsk filesystem verification and repair process). The bogus autochk.exe then creates system services that fetch files over unencrypted HTTP.
Lenovo's own guidance alludes to the overwriting of system files, but it's not at all clear how this is happening on Windows 7—the Windows capability to run executables stored in firmware appears to be new to Windows 8 — or why it's overwriting a system file. We've asked Lenovo about these issues, but the company merely referred us to its statement announcing the discontinuation of LSE and the availability of removal tools. (We suspect that the system in question has more than one way of injecting software into Windows, but more on this shortly.)
In the light of Schouwenberg's bug report, Microsoft recently updated its guidance for the this facility to note that software injected in this way should be written to be secure and that insecure programs are liable to be treated as malware. As for the feature itself, that remains a part of Windows.
And in its own awful way, it's a feature that makes sense. The underlying mechanism is simple enough; the firmware constructs tables of system information when the machine boots. The operating system then examines these tables to, for example, learn what hardware is installed in the machine and how it is connected. This is all governed by a specification called ACPI, Advanced Configuration and Power Interface. Microsoft defined a new ACPI table, the Windows Platform Binary Table (WPBT), that contains information about a firmware-embedded executable. When it boots, Windows looks for a WPBT. If it finds one, it copies the executable onto the filesystem and runs it.
The primary purpose of WPBT is the automatic installation of anti-theft software. This kind of software typically does a couple of things that require online connectivity: it can phone home to check if it's been reported stolen (and brick or otherwise disable itself if it has), and it can phone home to simply report where it is to aid recovery of lost or stolen hardware.
It's reasonably common (though by no means universal) for stolen hardware to have its disk wiped, thereby removing any anti-theft software and limiting the chance of recovery. WPBT provides a solution: even if the disk is wiped and the operating system reinstalled, the firmware can re-establish the software and report that the laptop was stolen.
Believe it or not, this is one of the less invasive anti-theft techniques in use. Anti-theft system LoJack (also known as Computrace) is widely found on business-oriented laptops (including some models from Lenovo). LoJack also injects itself into the operating system even after a clean installation, but the way it does so is rather more underhanded: it includes BIOS code that directly modifies Windows system files—including autochk.exe. Our guess is that LSE uses a similar technique to install itself when booting old operating systems like Windows 7, explaining the overwritten file that our forum poster observed.
In the context of anti-theft, this kind of capability makes sense and is arguably even desirable. The owner of a system should have the power and authority to establish robust protection in the case of theft. LoJack firmware, for example, traditionally ships in a "disabled" state and requires user intervention to enable. But a manufacturer using an anti-theft technique to install crapware feels like an abuse of the capability, especially as LSE was turned on by default.
Lenovo did include a firmware option to disable LSE, though we've seen one report that a system was showing LSE-like behavior but lacked the option to disable it.
It's not clear which other PC manufacturers have taken advantage of the WPBT capability, or in what capacity they've used it. The company that makes LoJack provides a lengthy list of systems that include its firmware, and most or all of them likely use this system. In the meantime, we'd recommend that users of affected systems (a full list of desktops can be found here and laptops here) update their firmware to remove LSE and then run Lenovo's LSE removal tool to clean the files from their disk.
Apple Squashes Serious Security Bug With Update to Mac OS X
Apple has fixed a bug in its desktop operating system that could have given hackers access to the entire OS.
Released on Thursday, Mac OS X 10.10.5 resolves scores of holes and technical glitches. But one serious bug in particular was squashed along with the rest. Known as DYLD, this vulnerability in Apple’s OS X was considered serious because it enables hackers to remotely run a program on a Mac using administrator rights, which opens up wide access to the entire operating system. The vulnerability had already been exploited “in the wild,” or in the real world, according to the Guardian, with at least one adware installer taking advantage of it.
The Mac OS has long enjoyed a reputation as more secure than Windows. But just like Microsoft, Apple has to do its fair share of patching with regular updates and bug fixes. The latest update resolves more than 100 different bugs affecting Bluetooth, QuickTime, the Mac OS X kernel, the Mac’s Notification Center and other features. In the past, Apple has sometimes been slow about patching individual bugs, whereas Microsoft rolls out a series of patches on a monthly basis through its Patch Tuesday program.
Apple’s details on the bug fix, which is available for OS X Yosemite versions 10.10 through 10.10.4, said that with the vulnerability, “a local user may be able to execute arbitrary code with system privileges.” Apple noted that the problem was due to a “path validation issue” in DYLD and that the issue was addressed through “improved environment sanitization.” Apple did not immediately reply to CNET’s request for a layman’s explanation of these terms.
The DYLD bug was first reported by security researcher Stefan Esser. In a tweet posted late Thursday, Esser said: “Hmm so Apple released 10.10.5 fixed some bugs and made another security problem worse than before.” Esser didn’t reveal which security problem was allegedly made worse. But he reportedly has advised Mac users not to uninstall his SUIDGuard kernel extension, which guards against attacks that take advantage of the DYLD hole, according to security news site SecurityWeek.
Researcher Exploits Decades-old Flaw in Intel Processors To Access Protected Resources
Decades of changes to x86, Intel's ubiquitous line of PC processors, have left a labyrinth of forgotten backdoors into privileged access modes, warned independent security researcher Christopher Domas here on Thursday at BlackHat.
Lost in the years of x86 architecture improvements and patches, there is a design flaw that has gone unnoticed, according to Domas.
The flaw lies in the privilege levels that developed in the x86 architecture. The privilege levels originally included only Ring 0 through 3, but then negative rings were added, Domas explained. Eventually, Ring -2, where the system management mode was located, became a "dumping ground" for a lot of things.
"We dumped platform security into system management mode. Why not? Platform security is really, really important and Ring 0 could be compromised. If you put platform security into Ring -2, you don't have to worry about Ring 0 compromises," he explained.
"But this opened up a Pandora's Box for what system management mode could do. It is now in charge of an alarming number of very important things for the processor," he added. "Ultimately, Ring -2 is in control of the processor."
Exploiting this Ring architecture, Domas and his team developed a proof-of-concept universal privilege escalation attack. The researchers were able to demonstrate how to jump malware from the Ring 0 into the deepest realms of the processor, Ring -2.
Domas performed this hack with an architectural zero-day vulnerability built into the silicon itself, directed against a vulnerable string of code running on every system with an Intel processor. This enabled Domas's team to gain authorized access to the sensitive system resources.
Microsoft’s New Small Print – How Your Personal Data Is (Ab)used
Microsoft has renewed its Privacy Policy and Service Agreement. The new services agreement goes into effect on 1 August 2015, only a couple of days after the launch of the Windows 10 operating system on 29 July.
The new “privacy dashboard” is presented to give the users a possibility to control their data related to various products in a centralised manner. Microsoft’s deputy general counsel, Horacio Gutierrez, wrote in a blog post that Microsoft believes “that real transparency starts with straightforward terms and policies that people can clearly understand”. We copied and pasted the Microsoft Privacy Statement and the Services Agreement into a document editor and found that these “straightforward” terms are 22 and 23 pages long respectively. Summing up these 45 pages, one can say that Microsoft basically grants itself very broad rights to collect everything you do, say and write with and on your devices in order to sell more targeted advertising or to sell your data to third parties. The company appears to be granting itself the right to share your data either with your consent “or as necessary”.
A French tech news website Numerama analysed the new privacy policy and found a number of conditions users should be aware of:
By default, when signing into Windows with a Microsoft account, Windows syncs some of your settings and data with Microsoft servers, for example “web browser history, favorites, and websites you have open” as well as “saved app, website, mobile hotspot, and Wi-Fi network names and passwords”. Users can however deactivate this transfer to the Microsoft servers by changing their settings.
More problematic from a data protection perspective is however the fact that Windows generates a unique advertising ID for each user on a device. This advertising ID can be used by third parties, such as app developers and advertising networks for profiling purposes.
Also, when device encryption is on, Windows automatically encrypts the drive Windows is installed on and generates a recovery key. The BitLocker recovery key for the user’s device is automatically backed up online in the Microsoft OneDrive account.
Microsoft’s updated terms also state that they collect basic information “from you and your devices, including for example “app use data for apps that run on Windows” and “data about the networks you connect to.”
Users who chose to enable Microsoft’s personal assistant software “Cortana” have to live with the following invasion to their privacy: “To enable Cortana to provide personalized experiences and relevant suggestions, Microsoft collects and uses various types of data, such as your device location, data from your calendar, the apps you use, data from your emails and text messages, who you call, your contacts and how often you interact with them on your device. Cortana also learns about you by collecting data about how you use your device and other Microsoft services, such as your music, alarm settings, whether the lock screen is on, what you view and purchase, your browse and Bing search history, and more.” But this is not all, as this piece of software also analyses undefined “speech data”: “we collect your voice input, as well your name and nickname, your recent calendar events and the names of the people in your appointments, and information about your contacts including names and nicknames.”
But Microsoft’s updated privacy policy is not only bad news for privacy. Your free speech rights can also be violated on an ad hoc basis as the company warns:
“We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to”, for example, “protect their customers” or “enforce the terms governing the use of the services”.
So much for clearly understandable and straightforward terms of service.
Microsoft Privacy Statement
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement/default.aspx
Microsoft Services Agreement
https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/servicesagreement/default.aspx
Windows 10, Microsoft and your personal data: what you need to know (only in French, 11.06.2015)
http://www.numerama.com/magazine/33357-windows-10-microsoft-et-vos-donnees-privees-ce-que-vous-devez-savoir.html
Microsoft provides privacy dashboard ahead of Windows 10 launch (04.06.2015)
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2932132/microsoft-provides-privacy-dashboard-ahead-of-windows-10-launch.html
Harvard Student Loses Facebook Internship for App Exploiting Messenger's Privacy Flaws
A Harvard University student says he lost his internship at Facebook after he launched a browser application that exploited privacy flaws on its mobile messenger.
Aran Khanna's app Marauder's Map, named after the magical map of the Harry Potter series, showed that users of Facebook Messenger could pinpoint the exact locations of people they were talking to.
Khanna posted the app from his dorm room in May and tells Boston.com 85,000 people downloaded it.
Facebook asked Khanna to disable it. A week later, Facebook released a Messenger app update addressing the flaw that a company spokesman said had been in the works for months.
Khanna received a call from Facebook telling him the company was rescinding his internship offer because he violated the Facebook user agreement.
Facebook itself was launched from a Harvard dorm room in 2004.
You Can Now Run Windows 10 on Your Mac
Thanks to the new Boot Camp 6 update, you can now run Windows 10 on your Mac. Boot Camp, a program that allows users of Intel-based Macintosh computers to run the Microsoft Windows XP operating system, was revealed to be updated in a new support document on Apple’s website.
MacRumors reports “the update is still propagating and is not yet available for OS X,” however some MacRumors members “have noted the update is available within Windows partitions in Boot Camp.”
As of now, it appears this update will not be supported on Macs pre-2012 or on Macs not operating on OS X Yosemite — the full list of compatible Mac models can be found here.
The new Boot Camp 6 update also supports the following Mac features in Windows 10: USB 3, USB-C, Thunderbolt, built-in SD or SDXC card slot, built-in or USB Apple SuperDrive, and your Apple keyboard, trackpad, and mouse.
Windows 10 is a free update for existing Windows users, but you’ll need to purchase either the $199 Windows 10 Pro or $119 Windows 10 Home if you’re a new user.
'Haha' Has Killed 'LOL,' Says Facebook
If you still “lol” at jokes online then you might be in the minority. A new report from Facebook into how users express laughter shows that “haha” and its variants are by far the most common terms used on the social network. They accounted for 51.4 percent of mirth in the anonymized comments and posts looked at by Facebook’s data team, with laughter emoji claiming 33.7 percent, and “hehe” and its cognates 13.1 percent. The once-mighty “lol” only appeared in 1.9 percent of the text sampled by Facebook — a pretty staggering fall for an expression that was once synonymous with online txt speak.
Although not surprising for such a venerable term, “lol” proved slightly more popular with older users. Differences between generations were not heavily pronounced, but it was emoji that were most popular with users with the youngest median age, while “haha,” “hehe,” and “lol” were favored by progressively older individuals. The data also showed that emoji were more popular among female users, with “haha” showing a small male bias, and “hehe” distributed nearly evenly among the genders. Not may people were regular chortlers though: in the week’s worth of data Facebook looked at, 46 percent of those that laughed in the seven days did so only once, with the vast majority — 85 percent — laughing fewer than five times.
Facebook’s data team also examined how users deployed variants of these laughter terms, looking at whether they hehe’d more than they hehehehe’d, for example. An article in The New Yorker that inspired Facebook’s analysis suggested that we use “ha"s and "he"s as building blocks, adding up these lexical units to convey everything from polite recognition ("ha”) to no-really-I’m-going-a-bit-mad-with-laughter (“hahahahahahahaha”). Although interpretation of these different strings can be quite subjective, Facebook’s data showed that even letter counts were more common than odd ones, suggesting that we do indeed stack up these two-letter phonemes like Lego bricks.
As Facebook’s researchers explain: “The most common are the four-letter hahas and hehes. The six-letter hahaha is also very common, and in general, the haha-ers use longer laughter. The haha-ers are also slightly more open than the hehe-ers to using odd number of letters, and we do see the occasional hahaas and hhhhaaahhhaas. The lol almost always stands by itself, though some rare specimens of lolz and loll were found. A single emoji is used 50 percent of the time, and it’s quite rare to see people use more than five identical consecutive emoji.” However, Facebook’s data scientists should probably look at Instagram, where long strings of Face With Tears Of Joy emoji are more common. And judging by the demographics of the two social networks, this is how laughter online is likely to look in the future.
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