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On Tuesday, someone broke into an underground vault in Sacramento, and cut several high-capacity internet cables. Nobody knows who this person is or why they did it, but since that time the FBI has revealed that it was not an isolated incident. They’ve been investigating 10 other recent attacks on the internet infrastructure of California, and they seem to be deeply troubled by the vulnerability of these cables. ........................ The article goes on to compare these incidents to similar attacks that happened in Arizona last year, as well as California in 2009. However, they may be missing the bigger picture....

The hugely popular link-sharing site is in a state of virtual lockdown after the volunteers who run some of the site’s biggest communities (known as “subreddits”) went on the digital equivalent of a general strike. This followed the sacking of Victoria Taylor, a popular site admin, after a Reddit Q&A with the Rev. Jesse Jackson went badly for the activist preacher. High-traffic subreddits dedicated to movies, gaming, videos, history, science and art have been voluntarily locked by their moderators as an act of protest against the decision, which they saw as a symptom of an increasingly overbearing management that takes...

Russia's parliament gave its final approval on Friday to a law that would require Internet search engines to remove users' personal information from their results. The bill, passed by the State Duma lower house in its third reading, seeks to emulate European Union rules on the "right to be forgotten," under which search engines must take down certain results that appear under a search of a person's name. Under the new Russian legislation, Internet users will have the right to request the removal of information that is incorrect or "no longer relevant because of subsequent events or actions," TASS news...

For years Americans' right to privacy, as granted by the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, has come under threat as the country's surveillance systems have grown. After intelligence leaks by former National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden, however, the NSA's domestic dragnet is finally getting the attention that many people feel it deserves.

The latest snips occurred Tuesday, when someone sliced at least three fiber-optic cables in an underground vault in Alameda County east of San Francisco. The cuts disrupted Internet and phone service around Sacramento for 20 hours before service was restored.

Someone hacked through yet another fiber optic cable in the San Francisco Bay area early Tuesday morning, continuing a rash of incidents that have disrupted Internet traffic and vexed law enforcement officials. The latest attack occurred at around 4.30 am Pacific Time near the town of Livermore, about 50 miles east of San Francisco. Someone climbed down a manhole cover there and cut through several fiber optic cables, according to several reports. The FBI is investigating. The cables are operated by backbone providers such as Level 3 Communications, which sell capacity to other cable and Internet providers. The cables carry...

A post for the computer techies on the site Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) R. Barnes Request for Comments: 7568 M. Thomson Updates: 5246 Mozilla Category: Standards Track A. Pironti ISSN: 2070-1721 INRIA A. Langley Google June 2015 Deprecating Secure Sockets Layer Version 3.0 Abstract The Secure Sockets Layer version 3.0 (SSLv3), as specified in RFC 6101, is not sufficiently secure. This document requires that SSLv3 not be used. The replacement versions, in particular, Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2 (RFC 5246), are considerably more secure and capable protocols. This document updates the backward compatibility section of RFC 5246 and its...

Millions of low-income Americans will soon be able to access the Internet as part of the Lifeline program. That’s because the Federal Communications Commission, the agency responsible for its oversight, wants to add broadband to its suite of services. Established in 1985, Lifeline provides a discount on traditional phone services for eligible consumers, giving them the ability to connect to jobs, family members and emergency services. The program was updated to include wireless phone services in 2005, and the move to now include broadband for people to access the Internet reflects our changing communications ecosystem. Yet this month’s efforts by...

t's something that has happened to all of us: you finish an email, hit send, and suddenly realize that you've made a typo or spelled the recipient's name wrong. Or you were much too angry when you wrote it. For Gmail users there has been a quiet and until-now-unadvertised fix for this, known as the "Undo Send" feature. The feature does exactly what its name implies: it lets you un-send an email for a short while after sending. Of course, it isn't reaching out and snatching the email back -- it just holds the email for a brief period sufficient...

He seemed so stable, it’s a wonder how he wasn’t working for Media Matters. Curiously, like South Carolina killer Dylann Roof, he aspired to start a civil war. The suspect wanted in a string of recent attacks on Asian women in Manhattan has been found dead of an apparent suicide inside a basement on the Upper East Side, law enforcement sources said. The suspect, 25-year-old Tyrell Shaw, apparently hanged himself and was found in an elevator shaft on the 700 block of Madison Avenue, according to the sources. The body was positively identified as Shaw’s. What a shame. The writer...

The National Security Agency and its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, have worked to subvert anti-virus and other security software in order to track users and infiltrate networks, according to documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The spy agencies have reverse engineered software products, sometimes under questionable legal authority, and monitored web and email traffic in order to discreetly thwart anti-virus software and obtain intelligence from companies about security software and users of such software. One security software maker repeatedly singled out in the documents is Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, which has a holding registered in the U.K., claims more than...

Reviving an old computer is like restoring a classic car: There’s a thrill from bringing the ancient into the modern world. So it was with my first “real” computer, my Mac Plus, when I decided to bring it forward three decades and introduce it to the modern Web. It’s a lowly machine, my Mac. The specs pale in comparison to even my Kindle: 8 MHz CPU, 4 MB RAM, 50 MB hard drive, and 512 x 384 pixel black-and-white screen. My current desktop PC is on the order of 200,000 times faster—not even including the GPU. Still, that Mac Plus...

Today the FCC voted in favor of updating its Lifeline program to include broadband. This would mean that households surviving on low incomes would be able to receive help paying for a broadband connection. It might not be as important as electricity or water, but having a broadband connection is seen as being all but essential these days. From helping with education and job hunting, to allowing for home working, the ability to get online is seen as so vital by some that there have been calls for it to be classed as a utility. The Lifeline program has been...

Sen. Ted Cruz and his supporters are taking over the world of social media, the latest example being a "Twitter Rally" for the GOP presidential candidate that sent tweets to 1.1 billion followers. It occurred midnight Monday when the independent grassroots support group "Cruz Control" blasted out nearly 75,000 tweets on the candidate's behalf under the #CruzCrew hashtag. The rally started with a blast of 5,557 tweets and touched on the Texan's "extensive knowledge of the Constitution, his support for the 2nd Amendment, religious liberty, and his steadfast opposition to Obamacare and Common Core," said a spokesman, who added, "Other...

After enjoying nearly three decades of steady growth in its China business, Unilever PLC last year watched sales fall off a cliff. The maker of Dove soap, Lux shampoo and Comfort fabric softener warned in October of a 20% drop in its third-quarter China sales. The next quarter, the company announced another 20% fall. Unilever blamed a slowing Chinese economy and a pullback by shoppers. But a close look at retailing trends in China suggests Unilever was also feeling the pain of the migration of hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers to online shopping. Unilever wasn’t the only Western company...

The super-sophisticated malware that infiltrated Kaspersky Labs is more crafty than first imagined. We're told that the Duqu 2.0 software nasty was signed using legit digital certificates issued to Foxconn – a world-leading Chinese electronics manufacturer, whose customers include Microsoft, Dell, Google, BlackBerry, Amazon, Apple, and Sony. The code-signing was uncovered by researchers at Kaspersky Lab, who are studying their Duqu 2.0 infection. Windows trusts Foxconn-signed code because the Chinese goliath's certificate was issued by VeriSign, which is a trusted certificate root. Thus, the operating system will happily load and run the Foxconn-signed Duqu 2.0's 64-bit kernel-level driver without setting...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/06/14/federal-records-hack-china-pearl-harbor-column/71210018/

A Google executive is headed to Cuba this weekend to explore bringing better Internet access to the island, and the search giant has made a related proposal to the Cuban government, according to a State Department official. It’s the latest sign that U.S. tech companies are testing the seriousness of Cuba’s interest in opening up to outside investment after President Barack Obama’s announcement of a historic thaw in relations and the Raúl Castro-led government’s recent pledge to bring Internet access to all Cubans by 2020. n Cuba today, only about five percent of the population has Internet access, and cellphone...

Next week, the Federal Communications Commission is expected to approve a plan to add Internet access subsidies to its current $1.7 billion wireless phone subsidy program, called Lifeline. This comes in the wake of two federal audits that show a negligent lack of accountability in the existing program, as well as news reports of widespread fraud and abuse.

The recent cyber theft of millions of personnel records from the federal government was sophisticated and potentially crippling, but hackers with just rudimentary skills could easily do even more damage by targeting voting machines, according to security experts. In many cases, even the electronic ballots could be manipulated remotely, according to a new report. The report found that the AVS WINVote machines Virginia has used since 2002 have such flimsy security that an amateur hacker could change votes from outside a polling location. “This means anyone could have broken into the machines from the parking lot,” said Cris Thomas, a...