Panasonic 4K OLED TV for 2017 is coming – and looks like it’ll be a stunner

First there was the Viera CZ950V: Panasonic’s first 4K OLED television. A TV that we first laid eyes on back in January at the CES 2016 trade show; the very first THX certified 4K OLED, no less; a TV that, despite its £6,000 asking price, sold out its limited run of stock in little time.

Which is exactly why Panasonic is pushing forth a brand new OLED TV panel for 2017, name unknown. That hunger for the technology and for the inherent picture quality has made it a viable range to join the brand’s LED-LCD range, as currently headed by the Viera DX902.

So what can we expect from this new Panasonic OLED panel? If the prototype model on display at the IFA 2016 show in Berlin is anything to go by then it’ll be a super-slim telly. It’s interesting to see it in the 55-inch form, which is a little smaller than the 65-inch only CZ950V – so we suspect the 2017 range will come in at least those two sizes, possibly more.

Presented with a white bezel – something unusual for Panasonic in terms of design – this less-than-a-finger-thick TV is a real slender stunner to look at. Ideal for wall-mounting without the overhang.

Pocket-lint

And if the CZ950V was anything to go by, which is a UHD Premium badged TV for the utmost quality, then we can expect the forthcoming panel’s image-handling abilities to be top drawer.

Watching the pre-roll on the show floor at IFA and the blistering colours looked exceptional. And deep, deep blacks are a given too – which were almost indistinguishable from the surrounding black trim of the panel itself.

What we don’t know is how much it will cost. But with OLED prices coming down, fingers crossed that it will shave a couple of grand off the earlier CZ950V and make it a more viable purchase for the ultra-keen home cinema enthusiast.

Clueless Georgia official placed on election cybersecurity panel

When it comes to US government officials who might know a thing or two about cybersecurity, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp doesn’t rank highly. He was behind a massive private data leak that affected millions of that state’s citizens, which involved mailing out CDs filled with every voter’s drivers license and social security number. He also rejected an offer from the Department of Homeland Security to protect Georgia’s antiquated voting machines. But, for some reason, those “accomplishments” led to Kemp being placed on a DHS election cybersecurity panel this week, where he’ll work with other state officials to discuss potential technological threats to elections.

On the face of it, Kemp’s appointment is surprising. He blamed the private data snafu on “voter error” and fired an IT worker involved, reports The Intercept. But, aside from bringing on Ernst & Young to take a look at his departments cybersecurity, he didn’t do much to make up for his mistake. And when it comes to denying DHS protection on voting machines, Kemp said it would be a “vast federal overreach” that “would not equally improve the security of elections.”

Still, Kemp’s placement might not amount to much. He’s being joined by secretary of states from California, Connecticut and Indiana, and panels like this are often put together just to throw ideas around.

Via: The Intercept, Bizjournals, Fusion

Should we be worried about election hacking?

When you know you’re gonna lose, one surefire way to cast doubt on your loss is to say the whole thing was a setup.

That’s exactly what Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump did when he found out that he was trailing Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by nine points in Pennsylvania last month. While campaigning in the state, he said that the only way he could lose Pennsylvania is through fraud — as in, electronic voting machines that could be hacked.

This happens to be an issue that everyone from hackers to large information security companies have been trying to draw attention to for more than a decade.

Trump’s malfeasant wet dream started to look like reality when Brian Calkin, from the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (which shares information with the FBI), said Monday that MS-ISAC found three states targeted in recent voting-related hack attacks, though so far he’s not naming names.

That same day, a need-to-know, insider-only FBI flash on recently hacked elections systems was leaked. It confirmed that two unnamed states were breached and voter data snatched. Embarrassingly, the attackers used common off-the-shelf tools left in the default settings, employing a very basic flavor of attack called a SQL injection. Which is to say that literally anyone could’ve done it, possibly even someone with Trump’s IQ.

Many believe the two states in question to be Arizona and Illinois. Earlier this week, Arizona’s state government said its voting system was offline in June to cope with an attack. As for Illinois, its general counsel of the state’s board of elections, Ken Menzel, said a data breach discovered in July saw the theft of registration records for 200,000 voters.

We’re still in the dark as to which state is behind door number three. According to reports, an anonymous attacker in June targeted an unnamed county election official with a phishing email that installed a keylogger. Snatching the unknowing official’s credentials by recording their keystrokes, the invaders got access that would’ve allowed them to do things like delete voter registration records and prevent people from casting ballots.

Phishing and SQL injections — two simple and entirely preventable attacks that have had infosec pundits facepalming in dread all week.

But it’s not just security basics putting our democratic process at risk: It’s hubris. It may not be reassuring coming from hack-illiterate Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, but during a call August 15th with state election officials, he offered them the use of DHS cyber-hygiene services around voting — which would help secure election infrastructure by scanning for vulnerabilities and implementing NIST recommendations. Incidentally, such measures could prevent SQL injection attacks.

Despite those benefits, two states rejected the offer, including the great state of Georgia, which exposed six million voters’ private data in a security blunder earlier this year. That was when the office of Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp sent twelve different media organizations CDs containing the private information of the state’s six million registered voters — which included their names, home addresses, dates of birth, race, gender, Social Security and driver’s license numbers. Among the outlets that received the unencrypted files were The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Georgia GunOwner magazine. The “error” was blamed on one IT employee, who was fired.

In an unpalatable twist this week, Kemp has been named to work with the DHS’s Election Cybersecurity Panel.

Zeynep Tufekci, a University of North Carolina information and library science professor, told NPR over the weekend that Georgia is running electronic-only machines that have zero paper trails. Not only are the machines used in the state more than ten years old and the hardware “falling apart,” he said “the operating system they’re using is Windows 2000, which hasn’t been updated for security for years, which means it’s a sitting duck.”

Unfortunately, this problem isn’t confined to the Peach State. Voting machines throughout the US are so old and feeble they’re practically pedal powered. And they were born that way. Def Con has been joyfully cracking voting machines since at least 2004. In fact, the machines are so badly maintained, historically backdoored, and easily hacked that even Def Con hackers massively stress out about the voting process in their own forums and chat spaces.

For this election, most voting jurisdictions will be using machines that are at, or near, the end of their life cycles. It’s not even an opinion anymore; a study released last year by the Brennan Center called “America’s Voting Machines at Risk” puts it on the record.

According to the paper’s findings, voting machines are like laptops in that they’re not supposed to last a decade and must be upgraded to avoid “flipped votes, freezes, shut downs, long lines, and, in the worst case scenarios, lost votes and erroneous tallies.”

“Voting Machines at Risk” also tells us that “Forty-three states are using some machines that will be at least a decade old in 2016…. In 14 states, machines will be 15 or more years old.”

What’s worse, “nearly every state is using some machines that are no longer manufactured and many election officials struggle to find replacement parts,” according to Larry Norden, the report’s author. He recently told press that “everything from software support, replacement parts and screen calibration were at risk.”

On the upside, the report does mention that the machines get put out to pasture now and again. Apparently the state of Virginia “recently decertified a voting system used in 24 percent of its precincts after discovering that an attacker could get in through the machine’s wireless features to record voting data or inject malicious data.”

It’s all too convenient for Trump and anyone else who loses on election night, who can cite everything here as “proof” that their elections were rigged. The terrifying fact is that our election infrastructure is caught in the crossfire of pisspot politics, its security has been neglected from the get-go, and it’s time for the voting machine glue factory in every curtained stall.

So should we be worried? Yes, I think so.

Distressingly, “America’s Voting Machines at Risk” added that “in interviews with dozens of election officials and independent technology experts, the word ‘crisis’ came up repeatedly.”

At the risk of being crude, that’s not exactly the word I’d use for it.

Image: PETER MUHLY/AFP/Getty Images (voting machines circa 2002)

Brave browser lets you tip your favorite sites in bitcoin

Brave, the browser meant to block ads and trackers by design, has launched what might be a fairly controversial service: the ability to tip websites via bitcoin.

Now, after attaching your bitcoin wallet to the Brave browser, you can either tip sites manually or do so via automated installments meant to be sent regularly. They’re totally anonymous, according to Brave, and the company states that neither it or anyone else will be able to connect page views with these small tips. Publishers will need to authenticate their identities before claiming their “tips.”

Certain publishers haven’t been so keen on Brave’s initiative to keep the browser free of ads, so this is likely Brave’s way of trying to curry favor with those that feel as though they were burned by its mission statement.

Brave users previously had the option of paying for an ad-free experience (blocking Brave’s smaller ads) if they desired by pulling funds from donations or their bitcoin wallet. This is an interesting step forward for the browser that seems to be an attempt to smooth things over on both the publisher- and customer-facing fronts.

If you’re interesting in trying out Brave, you can get it here.

Via: Ars Technica UK