Weeks disputed that estimate, noting that many of the passwords and accounts seemed like duplicates.
“It’s worth noting that, so far, we’ve discovered that the list of alleged accounts and passwords found on Pastebin consists of more than 20,000 duplicates, many spam accounts that have already been suspended and many log-in credentials that do not appear to be linked (that is, the password and username are not actually associated with each other),” he said.

Credit:cnet.com

Credit: cnet.com

The New York State Electronics Recycling Reuse Act requires electronics manufacturers who currently sell Covered Electronics Equipment in the state of New York to provide for a FREE, convenient and environmentally compliant electronic recycling program for all consumers throughout the state.

By law, the following Covered Electronic Equipment (CEE) can be recycled for FREE:

Computers / Laptops / CRT Monitors / LCD Monitors / Televisions / Keyboards Mice / Fax Machines/ Scanners / Small Copiers and Printers / VCRs / Portable Digital Music Players / DVD Players / Digital Converter Boxes / Cable or Satellite Receivers / Electronic or Video Game Consoles / Cell Phones and Small Scale Servers weighing less than 100 lbs)

Items which are NOT COVERED under the NYS law include:
Batteries, Fluorescent Lamp Material, Typewriters, Tape Media and Oversized Items

Exceeding 100 Lbs. (for example: Large Copiers Large Printers, Etc.)

Monroe Tech is proud to be listed with the DEC as a registered E-waste collection location in Monroe County for computer, electronics, monitor, TV, stereo, printer, laptop, desktop, CRT monitor, LCD monitor and more.

Monroe Tech is also proud to be a part of the RCR&R Alliance Network of recyclers in Monroe County.

If you have any questions about recycling, or how we can help, please call us anytime at 585-392-TECH(8324)

“Your computer has DNS settings that mean you probably have the DNS Changer malware. Please visit http://www.opendns.com/dns-changer for help fixing your DNS. You may lose access to the Internet after July 9th, 2012 if you don’t fix this. For additional information regarding the DNS changer malware, please visit the FBI’s website. DNS Changer warning provided by Cloudflare.”

What does this all mean? Well, number one.. believe it; it’s real. Your computer is infected with a virus that causes some web sites you visit to be redirected by the author of the virus. Have your computer cleaned by a qualified professional as soon as you can, or starting July 9th, your internet connection will go dark.

Who is behind this? The FBI, a company called OpenDNS and a company called Cloudflare. What the FBI has done is ‘hijacked’ the addresses that the virus authors use and then worked with the 2 aforementioned Internet service companies to show the warning message. You only see the message if your computer is being redirected to that site. So.. If you see it, you’re infected.

The reason for the warning is that the FBI has already shut down the primary server hosting this malware. But if they shut it down now, anyone infected will lose their connection immediately. So in a sense, the FBI is keeping the malware server (it’s been cleansed) on life support to give people time to fix their machines.

Interesting stuff. You can read more about this by reading a joint press release from OpenDNS and Cloudflare here.

Microsoft announced today that it is “making Windows Media Center available in Windows 8.” But… this is actually a half truth.
The tech company is taking a number of steps to make sure Windows 8 supports Media Center just like in Windows 7. However, it’s changing Media Center’s integration into Windows. Rather than shipping it with Windows 8 — as it has done in the last two versions of Windows — users now have to buy the Media Center separately as an upgrade.
“Given the changing landscape, the cost of decoder licensing, and the importance of a straight forward edition plan, we’ve decided to make Windows Media Center available to Windows 8 customers via the Add Features to Windows 8 control panel (formerly known as Windows Anytime Upgrade),” Microsoft wrote in a blog post today. “Windows Media Player will continue to be available in all editions, but without DVD playback support.”

Users interested in Media Center have a couple of choices. If they buy Windows 8 Pro, they can they purchase Windows 8 Media Center Pack to have full integration with DVD playback, broadcast TV recording and playback, and VOB file playback. If they have just Windows 8, they can buy the Windows 8 Pro Pack to get Media Center. Microsoft has yet to announce the cost for Windows 8 and the upgrades; it did say, however, that the Media Center Pack pricing will be “in line with marginal costs.”
The separate pricing issue aside, Microsoft also said today that with the Media Center it is focusing on a “comprehensive video and audio platform for developers to build engaging and differentiated apps.” The apps will use decoders specialized for system reliability, battery life, and performance. In addition, playback will include YouTube video, Netflix video, Amazon audio/video, Hulu video, MP4 video, and more.

Credit: cnet

The IPO, expected this month, would raise up to $13.6 billion, of which nearly half would go to existing shareholders including company founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The company will raise about $5.8 billion, assuming a midrange price of $31.50 a share, according to the company’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The preliminary price range would value the company at $77 billion to $96 billion, according to Reuters. That would be far higher than the previous record Internet IPO, which was Google, valued at $23 billion when it went public in 2004.

An IPO at the high end of the range would value Facebook at virtually the same level as Amazon.com, which has a market capitalization of about $103 billion. Facebook had net income of $1 billion on revenues of $3.7 billion last year, compared with Amazon’s earnings of $631 million on total sales of $48 billion.

“People are going to be very comfortable with this valuation,” Sam Schwerin of Millennium Technology Value Partners told Reuters. He said the price was conservative and predicted underwriters “will walk the range up.”

The firm, which owns Facebook shares worth roughly $200 million, is not selling any in the IPO.

Facebook had revenue of just over $1 billion in the latest quarter, up 30 percent from year-ago levels, although profits were down because costs were sharply higher.

A total of 337.4 million shares will be sold in the offering, about 12 percent of the total outstanding.

Zuckerberg, 27, who will continue to dominate the company with 57.3 percent of the voting power under the company’s two-class stock system. He could enjoy a $1 billion payday if the company goes public at the $35 level, because he is selling 30 million shares. His remaining stake of 503 million shares would be worth about $17.6 billion at that level.

Many analysts had expected Facebook to price its IPO even higher, at around $40 a share. Max Wolff, an analyst at Greencrest Capital Management, said Facebook had likely toned down the price range for the closely watched public offering because of the current subdued market mood.

“It feels to me that as market sentiment gets less bright, people are getting more nervous,” he told CNBC.

However, the Facebook IPO is still “a very big deal in every sense of the term,” he added, so it’s important for the 33 underwriting banks involved in the deal to see it go well.

The social media juggernaut, which plans to list its stock on Nasdaq under the ticker “FB,” is wrapping up its prospectus with regulators and may begin its “roadshow” as soon as Monday, according to reports. During the roadshow, management will give potential investors a presentation touting its business.

Facebook’s roadshow will reportedly span New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore and possibly Los Angeles over eight or nine days. Based on that time frame, Facebook, the world’s largest social network, would be ready to go public in mid-May.

If all goes well, Facebook’s stock would price May 17 and make its public debut May 18, The Associated Press reported.

Credit : msnbc

If it doesn’t, then Google may have recorded your Internet traffic, according to a report released this month by the Federal Communications Commission.

Google won’t turn over the data it gathered from Wi-Fi networks in the United States, but in other countries, Google snooped on Wi-Fi networks and recorded details of email logins, medical information, sexual preferences and even evidence of extramarital affairs.

The FCC report was first revealed last week by the New York Times, which provided a heavily redacted version of the document. On Friday, Google gave the Los Angeles Times a version in which only individual names were blacked out.

The report says a single Google engineer, as part of an independent side project, wrote software that saved data captured from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks.

However, if the software encountered encrypted data, such as would be found on a password-protected network, it did not record the information.

Somehow, that side project, which Google insists only a few employees knew about, became part of the basic software in Google Street View cars roaming across North America and Western Europe.

Such recording of private information may be a violation of federal wiretapping law. The FCC was not able to determine culpability because the unnamed engineer, identified in the FCC report only as “Engineer Doe,” invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Instead, the FCC slapped Google with an $25,000 fine — the maximum allowed — because “(f)or many months, Google deliberately impeded and delayed the [FCC Enforcement Bureau's] investigation.”

How it was supposed to work
As Google’s Street View cars drive around America photographing streets, the specially modified cars also scan around for commercial and home Wi-Fi networks. Hackers call that “war driving.”

Computers on the cars record the name and location of each network they encounter, and add them to a database of known Wi-Fi networks for Google Maps similar other location services to use.

A smartphone or tablet uses such a database to locate itself if it can’t get location data from cellphone towers or Global Positioning System satellites.

You can try it yourself: Turn off your smartphone’s GPS and cellular service, but leave Wi-Fi on, or use a Wi-Fi-only tablet.

Open the Google Maps or Bing Maps app, and you’ll see that the app still knows where you are. That’s because it knows the physical location of the Wi-Fi network you’re connecting to.

Collecting Wi-Fi network names isn’t against the law. The network names are “public” in the same way that your home address is public if anyone can see the house number from the street, or that your car’s license plate is public if the car is parked in your driveway.

Again, try it yourself: Open your smartphone’s Wi-Fi settings menu and watch it as you walk down a suburban or city street. You’ll see many Wi-Fi network names appear, and then disappear, as you move into and out of their coverage areas.

Google doesn’t link the collected Wi-Fi network names to individual people, although such ties would be easy to figure out in many cases. As with much personal data aggregated by companies such as Google, Apple or Facebook, the information is “anonymized.”

What it wasn’t supposed to do
The FCC report says Engineer Doe crossed the line when he designed software for the Google Street View cars that automatically connected to Wi-Fi networks that weren’t password-protected.

The cars were no longer just wardriving. By hopping onto the unencrypted networks without authorization, they were also “piggybacking.”

Even worse, Engineer Doe wrote the software to capture snippets of whatever was being transmitted on those networks — the FCC report calls it “payload data” — in the hope that maybe Google would be able to use that data someday as long as it was properly anonymized.

That’s as if you, while using your smartphone to check out the names of the different Wi-Fi networks in your neighborhood, decided to also try to connect to each and every one of those networks; eavesdrop on all the Web surfing, email traffic and instant-messenger chats that were being transmitted wirelessly; and then save whatever you found.

“Using the code that Engineer Doe developed, Google collected payload data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks in the United States between January 2008 and April 2010,” the report says. “During that period, Street View cars driving in the United States collected a total of approximately 200 gigabytes of payload data — 200 billion bytes of information.”

The FCC demanded that Google let it look at the collected payload data, which Google had accumulated at a data center in Oregon. Google argued that it didn’t have to.

The FCC dropped the matter because Google had already handed over samples of payload data gathered from Wi-Fi networks in Canada, France and the Netherlands to those countries’ governments. That sample data was enough to show that Google, whether by design or not, seriously compromised unsuspecting citizens’ privacy.

In Canada, an investigation by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner found that the payload data revealed “the full names, telephone numbers and addresses of many Canadians” as well as “complete email messages” and “the contents of cookies, instant messages and chat sessions.”

The OPC said it was “troubled to have found instances of particularly sensitive information, including computer login credentials (i.e. usernames and passwords), the details of legal infractions and certain medical listings.”

A French investigation found login credentials, too, including to porn and dating sites, plus data that indicated the sexual preferences of individuals living at specific addresses.

The French also found “an exchange of emails between a married woman and married man, both looking for an extramarital relationship.”

There was enough information in the emails to reveal the first names, email addresses and physical addresses of the would-be adulterers.

What you can learn from this
It may never be clear whether the collection of private data was an accident, as Google insists it was, or part of the overall design.

What’s clear is not only that Google got caught, but that what Google did wasn’t hard to do.

If you’re running an unencrypted, password-unprotected Wi-Fi network, almost everything you do on that network can be eavesdropped upon by someone with a laptop, smartphone or tablet within 300 feet of your wireless router.

If you’re using an older wireless router with Wired Equivalent Privacy encryption, you might as well be transmitting unencrypted. WEP encryption is notoriously easy to crack.

Hackers snooping on unprotected or poorly protected Wi-Fi networks have been responsible for some of the biggest cyberheists in recent history, including numerous thefts from Seattle-area businesses from 2006 to 2011 and the 2007 TJX Companies data breach, which exposed 45 million credit-card numbers.

Everyone who runs a Wi-Fi network, whether at home or in the office, needs to be using one of the two Wi-Fi Protected Access encryption standards.

If your wireless router was made before 2005, check to see whether it can run WPA and turn it on. If not, get a new router.

You may not have anything to hide — no affairs, no incriminating emails. If your Wi-Fi network is properly encrypted, you may not have to worry whether you do.

On Wednesday, Lookout Mobile Security of San Francisco announced a mobile-malware milestone : the first known Android drive-by download.

The malware, which Lookout has named “NotCompatible,” uses code hidden in websites whose operators have no idea they’ve been hacked.

Android users who visit such sites will be prompted to install an app that purports to be a security update or Android patch — but only if they’ve previously set their device’s permissions to allow installation of apps from unknown sources.

PC, Mac or iOS users won’t notice anything wrong, as the infected code is set to respond only to Android devices.

SecurityNewsDaily visited one infected site using an Android tablet that allowed “unknown sources” apps. The tablet promptly downloaded something called “com.Security.Update,” which we can be pretty certain is a Trojan horse, malware that pretends to be something benign.

We did not install the app. Neither should you, if you come across anything that downloads without your permission. In that respect, Android apps have an advantage over PC users, who often have no option to refuse installation of malware from a drive-by download.

We did a Google search for the malicious code Lookout provided, and found only two sites. One belongs to a country club in Montana, while the other is a, ahem, “men’s interest” blog featuring well-endowed (but clothed) young ladies.

(For the technically minded, the sites are infected with an iframe that redirects all browsers to a site called “gaoanalitics.info.” Android browsers will continue to a site called “androidonlinefix.info,” which triggers the app download.)

SecurityNewsDaily will be contacting the sites’ administrators to let them know they’re infected.

It’s not clear what the malware does, but Trojans will often open a “backdoor” into a system that will allow cybercriminals to remotely install all sorts of malware, such as spyware, keyloggers, botnet controls or information-stealers.

If you’re an Android user, you need to do two things to protect yourself from such threats. First, set your device to not allow installation from “unknown sources.” Second, install some sort of Android anti-virus software.

The new variant — dubbed Flashback.S — “is actively being distributed in the wild,” taking advantage of a Java vulnerability that Apple has already patched, security company Intego said in a statement. The new variant installs itself on the user’s home folder without a password and then deletes all folders and files from the Java cache folder to mask its presence.

At its height, the original Flashback, which was designed to grab passwords and other information from users through their Web browser and other applications, was estimated to be infecting more than 600,000 Macs. However, the researchers did not indicate what this new variant was specifically designed to do or how many computers might be infected.

The original malware typically installed itself after a user mistakes it for a legitimate browser plug-in while visiting a malicious Web site. The malware would then collect personal information and send it back to remote servers.

While more than half a million Mac worldwide were thought to be infected by the original malware at the beginning of April, software maker and security firm Symantec last week lowered its estimate of machines that still have the malware to 140,000.

The lowered estimates were due in part to Apple’s release of software patches and software tools that both detect and remove the malware. Additionally, ahead of those official tools, Symantec and security firms F-Secure and Kaspersky released their own detection and removal software.

Credit: Cnet.com