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State-owned channel Rossiya 24 even showed footage of a technician opening up an iron included in a batch of Chinese imports to find a "spy chip" with what he called "a little microphone". Its correspondent said the hidden devices were mostly being used to spread viruses, by connecting to any computer within a 200m (656ft) radius which were using unprotected Wi-Fi networks. Other products found to have rogue components reportedly included mobile phones and car dashboard cameras.

A week after the contractors who built HealthCare.gov blamed the Obama administration for the site's failures, the administration is shifting the blame right back. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will tell a House committee tomorrow the site's botched rollout was the result of contractors failing to live up to expectations – not bad management at HHS, as the contractors suggested. "CMS has a track record of successfully overseeing the many contractors our programs depend on to function. Unfortunately, a subset of those contracts for HealthCare.gov have not met expectations," Sebelius said in prepared testimony for tomorrow's hearing before...

Greek marketing group has created the first "Tweeting Bra" as part of a campaign from Nestle Fitness for October's Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The social networking bra utilizes a special mechanism hidden under the hook of the bra. When it is unhooked, a signal is sent to a cell phone which in turn notifies a server that generates a tweet.

Sebelius told Congress this afternoon that she will indeed agree to testify about the O-Care rollout — just not this week, as she has a scheduling conflict. Here’s a question for her when she does via Byron York: How are they paying for this all-hands-on-deck salvage operation of Healthcare.gov, which even The One himself described as a “tech surge” in the Rose Garden today? I’m not asking that rhetorically, either. Appropriations can be very confusing; plenty of people watching the “defund” pageant play out assumed, I think, that a shutdown would mean choking off funding for ObamaCare until it was...

Authorities have arrested a man in San Francisco, California accused of operating an underground website that allowed users to purchase guns and drugs from around the world using encrypted, digital currency. Ross William Ulbricht, also known as “Dread Pirate Roberts,” was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Tuesday for his alleged involvement in the Silk Road online marketplace, according to court papers published this week. A sealed complaint dated September 27 was unearthed by security researcher Brian Krebs in which Ulbricht is accused of narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy money laundering conspiracy and more. According to prosecutors,...

Devices running iOS 7 can be remotely secured when lost, making it so that a device's associated Apple ID and password must be entered before it can be wiped and used again. In effect, the new system could make an iPhone almost unusable when stolen, should the system work as planned. The NYPD is evidently hoping that it will discourage thieves, as so-called "Apple picking" theft has become a major problem. Last year, New York City's annual crime rate rose for the first time in two decades — a fact that Mayor Bloomberg blamed squarely on the theft of Apple...

The National Security Agency's director of information assurance today said the "way to achieve confidence in cyberspace" is to increase collaboration between the government and the high-tech industry--remarks that rang ironic given former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's revelations about how NSA works with industry. NSA documents leaked by Snowden showed that the NSA's goal is to build backdoors into commercial products and weaken encryption to make it easier for surveillance, allegations that the U.S. government has not even tried to refute. When asked about that today, NSA director of information assurance Debora Plunkett, who gave the keynote address at the...

The NSA's activities are a massive blow for US computer businesses "It's an ill bird," runs the adage, "that fouls its own nest." Cue the US National Security Agency (NSA), which, we now know, has been busily doing this for quite a while. As the Edward Snowden revelations tumbled out, the scale of the fouling slowly began to dawn on us. Outside of the United States, for example, people suddenly began to have doubts about the wisdom of entrusting their confidential data to cloud services operated by American companies on American soil. As Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice president responsible...

Since the beta test launching of Google Glass along with rumors surrounding the secretive Apple iWatch, “wearable tech” is a term frequently popping up in the headlines. We only have conjecture as to what the full scope of Apple's iWatch might be, however, it is difficult to imagine that it will bring revolutionary functions beyond what is already provided by the iPhone and iPad line. It begs the question... (continued)

Samsung unveiled its highly anticipated digital wristwatch Wednesday, beating Apple to what could become this year's must-have holiday gift item. So-called smartwatches, which can perform tasks such as displaying email and Twitter messages on a device worn around the wrist, have been around for several years but have failed so far to inspire great interest among ordinary consumers. But with smartphone behemoths Samsung Electronics Co. and Apple Inc. joining the fray—and Google pushing its Google Glass gadget—experts see a chance of wearable computers breaking into the mainstream. That is, if consumers can get used to talking to their watch, secret...

Georgia Tech sophomore Nick Selby on Sunday delivered quite possibly the craziest and most impassioned “welcome back” pep talk in the history of ever. And if it doesn’t excite or inspire you, you made need to check your pulse and make sure you’re breathing.

Michele Catalano was looking for information online about pressure cookers. Her husband, in the same time frame, was Googling backpacks. Wednesday morning, six men from a joint terrorism task force showed up at their house to see if they were terrorists. Which prompts the question: How'd the government know what they were Googling?

The number of digitally-connected schools has increased 83 percent during the past 15 years, thanks in part to E-Rate, a $2.3 billion federal program centered on providing schools and libraries with high-speed broadband and wireless Internet. The program has helped to revolutionize learning by facilitating schools’ access to modern telecommunications services and equipment. Today, 97 percent of American classrooms are connected to the Internet. But the needs of schools and libraries have shifted with the ever-evolving technological landscape since Congress established the program in 1996. Bipartisan reports dating back to 2005 called the E-Rate program “a well-intentioned program that nonetheless...

The market for streaming media players may no longer be a two-horse race between Apple and Roku. The introduction of Google's Chromecast has given the category a jolt -- but there were always more fish in the sea than the big two. Now that Google has gotten people talking about streaming media players in earnest, we've canvassed the competition, including some models you may have missed, to gage the strengthes and weaknesses of each.

(Reuters) - The annual Def Con hacking convention has asked the federal government to stay away this year for the first time in its 21-year history, saying Edward Snowden's revelations have made some in the community uncomfortable about having feds there. ... Last year, four-star General Keith Alexander, head of the National Security Agency, was a keynote speaker at the event, which is the world's largest annual hacking conference. The audience was respectful, gave modest applause and also asked about secret government snooping. Alexander adamantly denied that the NSA has dossiers on millions of Americans, as some former employees had...

Questions to Freepers using Firefox browser. I understood Adobe was open to hacking, malware and rootkits I use a Firefox browser. I have not been updating my Flash plug-in. Now, I cannot view embedded videos without updating Adobe Flash. Are substitutes available? Are the newer versions of Adobe Flash now secure??

Abstract. We describe the use of formal methods in the development of IRONSIDES, an implementation of DNS with superior performance to both BIND and Windows, the two most common DNS servers on the Internet. More importantly, unlike BIND and Windows, IRONSIDES is impervious to all single-packet denial of service attacks and all forms of remote code execution. Introduction DNS is a protocol essential to the proper functioning of the Internet. The two most common implementations of DNS are the free software version BIND and the implementations that come bundled with various versions of Windows. Unfortunately, despite their ubiquity and...

You’re not running a domestic terrorism group (well, there are those new DHS criteria…). You’re not even sending around emails about what a dismal failure President Obama’s administration is (THIS hour, anyway). You just want to be able to chat with friends, conduct your financial business, and argue with your spouse without Big Daddy Gummint all up in your biz. Believe it or not, that’s your right. Harry “Who Cares” Reid may blow it off and say the government’s been “doing that stuff for years,”but we’ve got a news flash for Harry: just because you’ve been doing it a while...

EDMONTON – When it comes to cell phones, there always seems to be a better model hitting the market. But before you ditch your old phone, make sure it’s completely wiped clean of all your personal information. That may seem obvious enough, but as Adam McKale saw firsthand, it doesn’t always happen. After switching his broken iPhone for a refurbished one at the Apple store in Southgate mall, he couldn’t believe what popped up when he plugged the device into his computer. “It was the guy’s name, all of his contacts, a bunch of his music – which isn’t so...

Mozilla is gearing up for a major user interface overhaul for the open source Firefox web browser. Code-named Australis, the new UI is likely to debut as part of Firefox 25, due out in October of his year.The Australis overhaul will be the biggest UI change since Firefox 4, which became generally available in March of 2011. After Firefox 4, Mozilla changed its release approach, from having only one or two releases in a year, to a rapid release cycle with new browsers released every six to eight weeks."Australis is our internal code name for a set of UI changes...