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The business networking site's home page is replaced by a domain sales page for about an hour. [Read more]    

judgecorp writes "In a move reminiscent of the 1960s Cold War days, Presidents Obama and Putin have set up a hotline between their respective cyber-security authorities, to defuse any possible crises and prevent them from escalating into an online equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis. 'We recognise that threats to or in the use of ICTs include political-military and criminal threats, as well as threats of a terrorist nature, and are some of the most serious national and international security challenges we face in the 21st Century,' a joint statement from the presidents read."

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Apple faces some tough choices when deciding on a display technology for the upcoming iPad Mini. That results in vagaries in suppliers' production schedules. [Read more]    

LG's next flagship smartphone will be powered by Qualcomm's speedy new system-on-a-chip processor. [Read more]    

The social browser creates a unique Android app that introduces navigation for bigger screens and "elevator buttons" for improved scrolling. [Read more]    

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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With reports of 13 battery fires and one injury, the big-box retailer is recalling around 5,100 replacement batteries for the Apple laptops. [Read more]    

Sometimes, cease-and-desist letters are mere morsels of intimidation, their legal grounds swamps. One lawyer decided that the accuser, West Orange, N.J., itself needed to shut up and go away. His letter smacks of literary genius. [Read more]    

itwbennett writes "Speaking at a cloud panel discussion hosted by Reuters on Wednesday, Terry Wise, head of global partner ecosystem for Amazon Web Services, explained how the company handles government requests for data stored on Amazon's cloud: 'If a U.S. entity is serving us with a legally binding subpoena, we contact our customer and work with that customer to fight the subpoena.' But Wise's best advice to customers is to encrypt their data: 'If the data is encrypted, all we'd be handing over would be the cypher text,' he said."

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Looking to get a leg-up in the bendable display market, LG Display is going full throttle ahead with production of the new technology for mobile devices. [Read more]    

Even as the company backtracks on its unpopular game-sharing policy, a company executive tells CNET that it won't budge on the price for the console, some $100 more than the rival PlayStation 4. [Read more]    

Microsoft's backpedaling on DRM restrictions for its upcoming Xbox One is not the first reversal from a tech giant. Here are 12 others. [Read more]    

The top 10 most commonly used words contained in default iPhone hotspot passwords, ordered by relative frequency. Kurtz, et al.

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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gurps_npc writes "Two radical pro-Israel terrorists were caught in upstate NY when they tried to solicit money from various honorable Jewish organizations to build a truck based x-ray weapon. They intended to drive the truck around and then turn on the x-ray machine, focusing on enemies of Israel. But the Jewish organizations they tried to solicit money from refused to participate. Instead they called the FBI, who promptly set up a sting. The men were arrested before the machine was in working order."

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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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sfcrazy writes "A top Monsanto executive has won the prestigious World Food Prize. Secretary of State John Kerry announced the award where Robert T. Fraley, the executive vice president and CTO of Monsanto, won the prize along with two other scientists from Belgium and the US. The award was given for devising a method to insert genes from another organism into plant sell, which could produce new genetic lines with highly favorable traits."

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Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

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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Here is everything that we know about the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One and how the yet-to-be-released consoles compare with each other. [Read more]    

Change.org petition protests the use of a U.S. lead actor in the game version of the classic Aussie film: "Carn mate, you just gotta get a true-blue Aussie bloke to do the yapping in this game." [Read more]    

It's no coincidence that the teaser videos come just a day before Twitter rival Facebook is expected to announce an Instagram video feature for sharing more than photos through Instagram. [Read more]