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Remember the bus company owner who threatened to sue a redditor for libel, sued a customer for complaining about offensive comments made by a driver, and filed over 100 lawsuits against passengers for "liquidated damages" over issues like handing over the wrong printed ticket for a round trip or violating his company's terms of service?
Well, he's now trying to re-open the lawsuit against the complaining passenger with a new attorney after his previous attorney had the case dismissed with prejudice. And he's trying to intimidate redditors by filing Freedom of Information Act requests with the University of Illinois in an attempt to expose their personal data. Also, he—or someone posing as him—has returned to reddit to trash-talk.
Dennis Toeppen, once a notorious domain-squatter, filed a FOIA request with the University of Ilinois requesting "Any and all communications to which Joel Steinfeldt of Office of Public Affairs is a party which mention, relate, or pertain to to Suburban Express, Matthew Finnicum, Murph Finnicum, or Jeremy Leval, for the period 1/1/2013 to present." A link to the electronic files generated in response to the FOIA request was then posted to reddit.
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If you use your iPhone's mobile hotspot feature on a current device, make sure you override the automatic password it offers to secure your connections. Otherwise, a team of researchers can crack it in less than half a minute by exploiting recently discovered weaknesses.
It turns out Apple's iOS versions 6 and earlier pick from such a small pool of passwords by default that the researchers—who are from the computer science department of the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, Germany—need just 24 seconds to run through all the possible combinations. The time required assumes they're using four AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics cards to cycle through an optimized list of possible password candidates. It also doesn't include the amount of time it takes to capture the four-way handshake that's negotiated each time a wireless enabled device successfully connects to a WPA2, or Wi-Fi Protected Access 2, device. More often than not, though, the capture can be completed in under a minute. With possession of the underlying hash, an attacker is then free to perform an unlimited number of "offline" password guesses until the right one is tried.
The research has important security implications for anyone who uses their iPhone's hotspot feature to share the device's mobile Internet connectivity with other Wi-Fi-enabled gadgets. Adversaries who are within range of the network can exploit the weakness to quickly determine the default pre-shared key that's supposed to prevent unauthorized people from joining. From there, attackers can leach off the connection, or worse, monitor or even spoof e-mail and other network data as it passes between connected devices and the iPhone acting as the access point.
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The ramifications of the National Security Agency’s telephony metadata scandal are starting to work their way through the legal system in cases not related to national security.
Earlier Wednesday, we reported on a California case where a defense attorney was not allowed to see a secret court opinion outlining why he couldn’t compel the government to produce a surveillance application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).
In a new 21-page legal filing (PDF) for a separate Florida-based federal criminal case, the government seemed to indicate that its routine collection of metadata by the National Security Agency does not include cell-site location information (CSLI). The dragnet of collected metadata referenced by the government was described in a recently-leaked FISC order requiring Verizon to give up millions of such records daily. However, it’s certain that the government has the ability to acquire such location information for specific targets over specific periods of time.
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Some day, far down the road, we'll be sitting with our grandchildren at our feet. As we rock in our holochairs watching the virtual sunset in our Googlezon immersi-room, we'll get all nostalgic. We'll look back on the period of May to June 2013 fondly, remembering all those memes we posted and those angry diatribes we wrote. We'll look down fondly at those tiny children, busy killing zombies in ActiBethesdaValve-Blizzard's Portal to World of Call of Fallout 6, and we'll say something like the following:
"Little Jimmy, did I ever tell you about the days when I fought and won in the great Microsoft used-game/Internet check-in battle of '13?"
It's a bit too easy to say that Microsoft's surprise reversal of its controversial game licensing policies today was just a reaction to the strident voices of a few on the Internet—that may have been how it started, though. In the high-pressure echo chamber of E3 last week, the unfortunate impression of Microsoft's next system started to leak into the mainstream, getting ink in big name newspapers and magazines and even ranking an applause-grabbing negative mention on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last night. When your system is on the verge of becoming a joke for a late night comedian, you know something must be done.
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