Teenage TalkTalk hacker sentenced

The teenage hacker that played a key role in the 2015 TalkTalk data breach has been sentenced to a 12-month youth rehabilitation order today, after pleading guilty to seven charges under the Computer Misuse Act last month. Alongside a nominal fine, the 17-year-old has also surrendered his iPhone and a computer hard drive to police. As The Guardian reports, the rehabilitation order is intended to “draw him from the lonely confines of a bedroom and that lonely world of computing to a family where his knowledge and skills could be put to good use and to project that out to the wider world.”

The teen used an SQL mapping tool to identify a vulnerability in TalkTalk’s website last year, which he then proceeded to publish online. Only two of his seven charges are related to this, though, as during the investigation police discovered he’d targeted other websites, including those of Manchester and Cambridge universities.

He didn’t attempt to profit from the TalkTalk hack, and claimed he was just “showing off.” But after publishing details of the vulnerability online, others ran with it and bombarded the ISPs website over 14,000 times. More than 150,000 customer details were stolen, including over 15,000 bank details.

According to an earlier BBC report, seven people have been arrested in connection with the breach, with several court cases in progress. One 19 year-old, for example, faces more serious charges of blackmail and fraud, after allegedly trying to extort a Bitcoin ransom (worth upwards of £200,000) from TalkTalk following the breach.

Speaking at this first sentencing today, chairman of the bench Jean Bonnick said to the 17 year-old: “Your IT skills will always be there — just use them legally in the future.”

In its latest financial report, TalkTalk said it’s well on the road to recovery after last year’s data breach, which damaged its reputation significantly. Less than six months after the attack, almost 100,000 customers had jumped ship despite the company offering free upgrades in apology.

The Information Commissioner’s Office has also fined the ISP £400,000 for failing to patch a known vulnerability that ultimately led to the hack. That’s small fry in the grand scheme of things, though. In its last annual report, TalkTalk said it had incurred £42 million in costs related to the breach.

Via: The Guardian

Adobe Photoshop Updated With Touch Bar Support

Adobe has released an updated version of Photoshop CC 2017 for Mac with support for the Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pro, providing users with access to controls based on three categories: Layer Properties, Brushes, and Favorites.

Photoshop’s implementation includes a History Scrubber to jump to any recent state of a document created during the current session. Each time a user applies a change to the document, a new document state is added. Users can scroll through or tap thumbnails on the Touch Bar to navigate the document history.

Touch Bar functions for Layer Properties include adjusting the layer opacity and visibility, scrolling through available blending modes, and making a layer a clipping mask. For brushes, users can use the Touch Bar to pick a color, brush size, brush hardness, brush opacity, and brush flow.

Favorites includes a Screen Mode for toggling between the normal screen mode and full screen mode, and controls for invoking the New Layer command and flipping layers horizontally or vertically. Meanwhile, a Fill Mode control invokes the Fill command with the Content-Aware Fill option preselected.

Photoshop design manager Bradee Evans demoed the Touch Bar features at Apple’s new MacBook Pro event in October. Skip to the 52:30 mark.

Photoshop users can update to the latest version using the Adobe CC Updater. Adobe says Touch Bar support is a “technology preview,” meaning the feature is not considered “production-ready” but nonetheless is available for users to try out.

Tags: Photoshop, Touch Bar
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Delayed no more, Apple AirPods go on sale

Just when we thought we might not see Apple’s wireless AirPods before Christmas, the tech giant has come out and said they’re now available to pre-order, with units arriving in stores and online from next week.

• Apple’s delayed AirPods will finally ship ‘over the next few weeks’

The AirPods were announced on stage alongside the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus in September, and were said to be available to buy from late October. That date never came and Tim Cook was forced to tell customers that Apple needed “a little more time” before the AirPods would be ready for customers.

Thankfully, the £159 wireless in ears can be yours or a gift for a loved one in time for Christmas.

The AirPods have no interconnecting cable but instead connect to each other via Bluetooth and can automatically connect to any of your iDevices when they’re placed in the charging case and then near your iPhone or iPad. Once you have connected, the AirPods can connect to any of your other devices registered with iCloud automatically.

• Apple AirPods review: Wire-free future or design disaster?

The design of them could cause many to be worried that they’d fall out on a run or walking around, but from our time with them we encountered no such problems. They fit snugly, sounded good and we loved the intuitive features enabled by the W1 chip, such as pausing music when you take one of the earphones out.

You can buy a pair of AirPods from Apple’s website now for £159, with a delivery date set for Monday 19 December.

Hollywood forces VidAngel to stop streaming its movies

The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Warner Bros, Disney and Fox have won an injunction against “family values” streaming service VidAngel. In the aftermath, VidAngel has announced that it will “cease streaming all works for which it has not obtained licensing.” The company has also pledged to appeal, taking the fight all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary.

VidAngel’s pitch is twofold: you can stream new movies for a dollar, with the added bonus of very specific censorship options. In its commercial, it suggests that you can watch The Wolf of Wall Street without the language or Game of Thrones without the nudity or violence. Which will save you a bucketload of time, since a sanitized version of each would last about four minutes.

In order to make that happen, however, VidAngel purchased movies on DVD, uploaded them to its server and then “sold” a copy to its customers for $20. When the film had been seen, the company would then “buy back” the copy for $19, making the price for each rental a tidy buck. It sounds dodgy, but VidAngel felt that it was protected by the Family Movie Act (2005), which relaxed provisions of the DMCA for this sort of “family-friendly filtering.”

The studios felt differently, and called VidAngel an unlicensed VOD streaming service that violated windowing regulations. For instance, you could watch an edited version of Star Wars: The Force Awakens days after it was available on DVD, even though it wasn’t yet due to appear on streaming services. Judge Andre Birotte Jr. sided with the studios, saying that the protections afforded by the Family Movie Act didn’t apply. Mostly because you need to work with an “authorized” copy of a studio movie, not just a DVD you picked up at the store.

As a consequence, VidAngel has stopped offering its current catalog to users, but has pledged to keep fighting. It’s not shutting down in the interim, however, and will stream its first fully-licensed movie to customers at some point this week. Although there’s no guarantee that it won’t be something starring Kirk Cameron.

Via: THR

Source: Judgment (Documentcloud)

Omnity’s search engine uses rare word matching to find unexpected results

When it comes to search, there’s Google and there’s everyone else — the company is basically synonymous with searching the internet. But Omnity, a relatively new company from San Francisco, thinks own search that’s based on “semantic mapping” offers something that Google can’t do. Omnity’s trick is that it looks for the connections between documents on the internet based on rare words — the theory that research that has several of the same rare words will likely be about related topics, even if that research doesn’t directly link to or cite each other.

Thus far, Omnity has operated primarily by selling enterprise plans to companies and educational institutions. Omnity can search not only all of the public datasets it scans (like patents, scientific, engineering and medical documents, clinical trials, case law, SEC filings and so forth) but also a company’s internal documents — for some companies, Omnity indexes 150 petabytes of data.

That may be useful to massive institutions, but plenty of ordinary people could benefit from Omnity’s research features — so today, the company has announced that anyone can search the public databases it indexes for free. Omnity groups the free datasets into four groups: biomedicine, engineering, finance and law, and each set pulls from a wide variety of publicly available sources. Previously, the company offered limited demo searches for free, but now anyone can look up whatever they want.

Once you’ve signed up for a free Omnity account, you can initiate a search by typing in the Google-like search bar. You’ll be served up results grouped by primary sources (those directly related to your query) and secondary sources (documents that share key vocabulary with the primary documents). From there, Omnity offers lots of different ways of visualizing the connections between various documents so you can see what’s most potentially related before diving down the research long tail.

There are a lot of ways to extend your search from there, including clicking a word cloud to see specific documents containing those words or seeing a map which shows where the research originated. But one of Omnity’s most interesting features is that you can upload documents of your own for it to analyze. Once the document is uploaded, it’ll automatically look for those “rare words” and find other documents in its databases that match up with the one you added yourself. It’s worth noting that those documents you upload stay private to you — they aren’t added to Omnity’s overall database.

This adds up to a search tool that’s decidedly not for your average, day-to-day basic informational queries. But, if you work in a field and spend lots of time going down the rabbit hole of the internet, it’s entirely possible Omnity can reveal documents that you might have otherwise missed using a traditional keyword-based search engine like Google.

Students and researchers alike may find the tool useful — and now that it’s fully open and free, there’s no reason not to give it a shot. And Omnity expects this free version to serve as a good proof-of-concept for its work with larger enterprise companies. If a company or university gets hooked on the free version, it’ll probably be a lot easier for Omnity to show them the benefits of its paid service.