Tech Thoughts Daily Net News – February 21, 2013

Infographic: Identity Fraud Hit 1 Victim Every 3 Seconds in 2012 – Nearly 13 million U.S. adults were victims of identity fraud in 2012, an increase of more than one million victims over the past year, according to a new report from Javelin Strategy & Research. Identity fraudsters stole more than $21 billion from 12.6 million victims in 2012, the highest amount since 2009, the research firm said in its 2013 Identity Fraud Report, released Wednesday. This equated to one incident of identify fraud every three seconds.

How to improve your chances of recovering a lost Android phone – Password-protecting your smartphone makes sense, as it prevents unauthorized users from accessing your data. But it can also work against you. Fortunately, Android 4.0 offers a solution in the form of lock-screen contact information, which will display the message of your choosing even on a passcode-protected device. Here’s how to set this up.

Know what to expect from the Windows 8 Recovery Drive – Greg Shultz shows you how to use the Windows 8 Recovery Drive and exactly what to expect if you should ever need it.

Google Drive Adds File Previews for Photos, Videos, and Documents – If you’re a heavy Google Docs user, you probably know how annoying it is to sift through a bunch of files looking for the right one. Starting today, you can preview documents, PDFs, photos, and videos in drive with just a right-click.

State helps parents access dead child’s Facebook content – The Commonwealth of Virginia is correcting for privacy laws that make it hard for parents to get access to a deceased child’s digital content.

Police use Facebook to inform mother of her son’s death – Police in Georgia say they tried traditional methods to contact Anna Lamb-Creasey before resorting to Facebook. She doesn’t get the message for weeks, as it didn’t come from a friend.

White House warns of dangers posed by WikiLeaks, LulzSec, other ‘hacktivists’ – New Obama administration strategy says organizations such as WikiLeaks and hacking group LulzSec may conduct “economic espionage against U.S. companies.” (Who other than corrupt government is afraid of the sunshine?)

How to make Ubuntu Linux look like Windows 7 – Luckily, Linux is customizable—much, much more than Windows. In fact, if you’re having trouble with the transition (or plopping Ubuntu on a parent’s PC), you can tweak and tune the OS to feel pretty darned close to the Windows environment you’ve forsaken. I’ll go through two methods here. One adapts Ubuntu’s default Unity desktop to make it feel slightly more like Windows, while the other entails a bit more work and a different desktop interface entirely to create a truly Microsoft-like experience.

PlayStation 4 goes x86: 8-core CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a hard drive – Sony announced its next generation gaming system: The PlayStation 4. Andrew House, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, kicked off the announcement by explaining that the PS4 is totally focused on games and gamers — a pleasant change of pace when compared to the multimedia focus the Xbox team has taken lately.

10 things you can do to boost your BYOD security – If you’re going to allow users to bring their own devices, find out what you can do to maintain security and be a happier you. These ten security recommendations will help you do both.

Tweet From Beyond the Grave With LivesOn – While zombies are all the rage, this might be taking it a bit too far. You can tweet from the womb, why not from beyond the grave? In a bizarre twist on the supernatural, social media is bridging the gap between the living and the deceased.

Security:

PayPal Credentials For Sale, Access Offered Via Proxy Server – An enterprising cybercriminal has opened an underground shop that peddles access to American PayPal accounts which are then accessible through an anonymous proxy service.

Twitter entreats users to use better passwords – Twitter is urging users once again to improve their passwords – both on Twitter and on other online services. Apart from the usual advice on using longer, more complex, and unique passwords for all websites they use, Twitter Director of Information Security Bob Lord entreats users not to click on suspicious links in Direct Messages, as they often lead to phishing sites that often look like Twitter’s login page.

How to filch explicit photos to fuel your revenge porn site – IsAnybodyDown’s owner apparently impersonated a woman to trick victims into sending him nude photos. Showing true monopolistic genius, he also seems to be running the photo-takedown service that promises to get those photos off his site – for a fee.

iOS Developer Site at Core of Facebook, Apple Watering Hole Attack – The missing link connecting the attacks against Apple, Facebook and possibly Twitter is a popular iOS mobile developers’ forum called iPhoneDevSDK which was discovered hosting malware in an apparent watering hole attack that has likely snared victims at hundreds of organizations beyond the big three.

Facebook, Apple hacks could affect anyone: Here’s what you can do – Reports suggest that both Facebook and Apple employees — and likely others, including Twitter — visited an infected website laden with malware, which exploited a vulnerability in Java. Now that the cause has been identified, here’s what you can do.

Company News:

Yahoo rolls out redesigned home page, hints at more changes – Yahoo’s home page got a dramatic facelift on Wednesday, a visual reminder of the site’s new direction under CEO Marissa Mayer. Mayer wants to usher in a new eraat the beleaguered company, and the site redesign that began rolling out for American users on Wednesday is a visible indication. The new look takes after popular social networks such as Facebook and Twitter with an infinitely scrolling newsfeed.

Qualys CEO to address security in a hyperconnected world at RSA Conference 2013 – Qualys Chairman and CEO Philippe Courtot will examine the evolution of security in a hyperconnected world in his keynote at RSA Conference 2013. Courtot’s keynote, which will also feature John Pescatore, director of the SANS institute, will reveal research on the state of cyber threats caused by intelligent devices and outline the fundamental changes required to secure this new era.

FCC makes a move to lessen Wi-Fi congestion – The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has taken the first step toward an expansion of the spectrum available for Wi-Fi, with the agency launching a rulemaking proceeding to open new parts of the 5GHz spectrum to unlicensed uses. The new spectrum could reduce congestion at Wi-Fi hotspots and allow speeds of up to 1 GBps, the FCC said. The FCC did not give a target date for the spectrum to be available for Wi-Fi.

Yammer to integrate Office Web Apps, SkyDrive Pro – Yammer plans to roll out an integration with the SkyDrive Pro cloud storage product and the Office Web Apps Web-hosted productivity application suite this summer.

Foxconn denies weak iPhone demand led to hiring freeze – Taiwanese contract manufacturer freezes hiring at its largest China plant in Shenzhen and slows down hiring at other factories, but it says the move is not due to weak iPhone 5 demand.

Red Hat’s Big Data strategy: A full stack approach – Open source vendor Red Hat announces a Big Data strategy that spans the full enterprise software stack, both in the public cloud and on-premise.

Webopedia Daily:

Apache Traffic Server – Apache Traffic Server is an open source extensible HTTP/1.1 compliant caching proxy server. Apache Traffic Server boasts caching capabilities that can improve response time while reducing server load and bandwidth needs by caching and reusing frequently requested web pages, images, and web service calls. It also offers “proxying” (see proxy server) to add keep-alive, filter or anonymize content requests, or add load balancing by adding a proxy layer. The Apache Traffic Server was formerly a commercial product, however, Yahoo! donated it to the Apache Foundation, and it is now an Apache TLP (Top level project). The version 3.0.0 Apache Traffic Server release (June 2011) can handle more than 200,000 requests per second.

Off Topic (Sort of):

Tesla publishes Model S driving logs that show The New York Times’ blatant lies – Following Elon Musk’s initial denouncement of The New York Times for publishing a fake review of the Tesla Model S electric car, he has now published the actual logs recorded by the car — and boy are they damning. In short, the NYT’s John Broder lied through his teeth to smear electric vehicles in general, and the Model S in specific. Tesla was onto something when they accused the NYT of lying.

Cracked: 21 Web Browser Features We Desperately Need – There are web browser plugins and settings that do everything from block ads to convert every page to Klingon. But they still don’t touch most common web annoyances. We asked you to show us what features would make browsing the web, truly tolerable.

How the FBI tracked Internet activist Aaron Swartz – A blogger has managed to obtain and publish once-classified FBI files that describe how the federal agency tracked and collected information about Internet activist Aaron Swartz.

US military introduces cyber soldier medal, signifies change in future of soldiering – The future of war requires that we give up romantic ideas of military service, a fact that the Pentagon openly embraced by announcing a new medal for drone pilots and “cyber warriors”.

Unfaithful fiancé exposed on Russia’s Google Street View – There’s one different between Yandex Maps and Google Maps: the faces of anyone caught there aren’t blurred, as one alleged philanderer discovers.

The mind-controlled bionic hand that also controls your mind – This week, a team of Swiss researchers announced that it will begin testing a new “sensing” bionic hand, one which looks to explode our ideas about the relationship between brain and machine. Now, it is the robots’ turn to speak.

Today’s Quote:

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

–     Charles Darwin

Today’s Free Downloads:

Elpis: A Native Pandora Radio Client for Windows – Elpis is a free and open source Pandora client for Microsoft Windows. It was created to provide a simple, lightweight and seamless way to enjoy music through Pandora while freeing you from the confines of a web browser and integrating into the desktop.

ArsClip – ArsClip is a clipboard and snippet manager that automatically keeps track of items that are copied to the Windows clipboard. You can press a configurable hotkey and a small popup menu will appear, allowing you to select an item and quickly paste it into a program or document. There is no additional window to launch or button to press.