FCC Approves Plan To Pay Satellite Companies To Give Up Airwaves (bloomberg.com) 38
Watch Out: This Verizon Smishing Scam Is Crazy Realistic (howtogeek.com) 75
For smishing scams, this is convincing work. The website looks real and authentic — if you don't look too hard at the address, which isn't actually Verizon's actual website... At the end of the process, the phishing website thanks you for providing your information and "redirects you to the home page." For maximum deception, the phishing website actually redirects you to Verizon's real website at the end of the process. If you don't look too close, you might be deceived into thinking you were on Verizon's website the whole time.
What's the game? We didn't provide real Verizon account details, so we can't say for sure. The scammer will probably try to take over your Verizon account, order smartphones on credit, and stick you with the bill.
T-Mobile/Sprint Merger Wins Approval From US Judge (reuters.com) 25
The decision by U.S. District Court Judge Victor Marrero clears the path for the deal, which already has federal approval and was originally valued at $26 billion. In his ruling, the judge noted the difficulty in deciding an antitrust case since it forces the judge to predict the future in deciding if a deal will lead to higher prices. But Judge Marrero said that he based his decision on three essential points. The first was that he was not persuaded by the states that the deal would lead to higher prices or lower quality wireless services. He disagreed that Sprint would remain a strong competitor and was unconvinced that DISH, who is buying divested assets from the deal, would fail to live up to its promises to enter and compete in the wireless market. Sprint and T-Mobile said in a statement they would move to finalize the merger, which is still subject to certain closing conditions and possible court proceedings. New York's attorney general said the state is considering an appeal; California's attorney general said that state is "prepared to fight."
Personal Data of All 6.5 Million Israeli Voters Is Exposed (nytimes.com) 28
"That page of code included the user names and passwords of site administrators with access to the voter registry, and using those credentials would allow anyone to view and download the information. Mr. Bar-Zik, a software developer for Verizon Media who wrote the Sunday article in Haaretz, said he chose the name and password of the Likud party administrator and logged in."
The flaw was first reported on Sunday by the newspaper Haaretz.
US States Tell Court Prices To Increase If Sprint, T-Mobile Allowed To Merge (reuters.com) 31
"I'm here speaking on behalf of 130 million consumers who live in these states," Glenn Pomerantz, a lawyer for the states, said at the outset of his argument. "If this merger goes forward, they're at risk for paying billions of dollars more every single year for those services." When T-Mobile majority shareholder Deutsche Telekom first contemplated the deal in 2010, it "expressly and unambiguously admitted that it had potential to reduce price competition," Pomerantz said. The states also emphasized that the carriers did not need a merger to introduce previous generations of wireless technology, and Pomerantz argued that T-Mobile would continue to acquire spectrum, or airwaves that carry data, from a variety of sources even if the merger was blocked.
Verizon Media Launches OneSearch, a Privacy-Focused Search Engine (venturebeat.com) 58
With its default dark mode, OneSearch lets you know that Advanced Privacy Mode is activated. You can manually toggle this mode to the "off" position which returns a brighter interface, but with this setting deactivated you won't have access to privacy features such as search-term encryption. With Advanced Privacy Mode on, links to search results will only be shareable for an hour, after which time they will "self-destruct" and return an error to anyone who clicks on it. More broadly, the OneSearch interface is clean and fairly familiar to anyone who has used a search engine before. But at its core, it promises to show the same search results to everyone given that it's not tailored to the individual. In the OneSearch privacy policy, Verizon says it it will store a user's IP address, search query, and user agent on different servers so that it can't draw correlations between a user's specific location and the query that they've made.
"Verizon said that it will monetize its new search engine through advertising; however, the advertising won't be based on browsing history or data that personally identifies the individual -- it will only serve contextual advertisements based on each individual search," reports VentureBeat. OneSearch is currently available on desktop and mobile web, with mobile apps coming later this month.
Academic Research Finds Five US Telcos Vulnerable To SIM Swapping Attacks (zdnet.com) 17
Verizon Will Finally Sell You TV Without a Contract (cnn.com) 44
CNBC Reports Open Source Software Has Essentially 'Taken Over the World' (cnbc.com) 103
The documentary does mention the 1990s, when Microsoft "even went so far as to call Open Source 'Unamerican' and bad for intellectual property rights." But two and a half minutes in, they also tell the famous story of that 1970s printer jam at MIT which led to the purchase of a proprietary printer that inspired Richard Stallman to quit his job to develop the GNU operating system and spearhead the free software movement. And at three and a half minutes in, they also describe how Linus Torvalds "unceremoniously released" Linux in 1991, and report that "By the turn of the century, NASA, Dell, and IBM were all using it." And at 4:18, they mention "other open source projects" gaining popularity, including MySQL, Perl, and Apache.
"But for the layperson at the turn of the century, the rise of these technologies could have gone unnoticed. After all, hardly anyone ran Linux on their personal computers. But then in 2008, Google released Android devices, which ran on a modified version of Linux. Suddenly the operating system blew up the smartphone market..." (Chen Goldberg, Google's Director of Engineering, cites 2.5 billion active Android devices.) The documentary then traces the open source movement up through our current decade, even mentioning Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub, IBM's acquisition of Red Hat, and various monetization models (including GitHub's new "Sponsors" program). And it ends with the narrator calling open source development "the new norm..."
"After all, the success of Open Source reveals that collaboration and knowledge-sharing are more than just feel-good buzzwords. They're an effective business strategy. And if we're going to solve some of the world's biggest problems, many believe that we can't afford to hoard our resources and learnings."
Here's a list (in order of appearance) of the people interviewed:
- Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub
- Devon Zuegel, Open-Source Product Manager, GitHub
- Chris Wright, CTO of Red Hat
- Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation
- Feross Aboukhadijeh, Open-Source Maintainer
- Chen Goldberg, Google's Director of Engineering
Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, even tells CNBC that 10,000 lines of code are added to Linux every day. "It is by far the highest-velocity, the most effective software development process in the history of computing... As the idea of sharing technology and collaborating collectively expands, we're moving into open hardware initiatives, data-sharing initiatives. And that's really going to be the future...
"The complexity of building these technologies isn't going down, it's only going up. We can get that technology out there faster when everybody works together."
Robocall Fines Rise To $10,000 Per Call Under Newly Passed Law (theverge.com) 62
The House voted overwhelmingly to approve the measure earlier this month, and Thursday's unanimous Senate vote means the bill only requires President Trump's signature to become law. Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA) said that the bill should be signed into law within the "next week or so."
Worried About 5G's Health Effects? Don't Be (wired.com) 99
That's led to two fears: That the effects of millimeter-wave signals might be more dangerous than traditional frequencies; and that the larger number of access points, some potentially much closer to people's homes, might expose people to more radiation than 4G services. But millimeter waves aren't the only, or even the main, way that carriers will deliver 5G service. T-Mobile offers the most widespread 5G service available today. But it uses a band of low frequencies originally used for broadcast television. Sprint, meanwhile, repurposed some of the "mid-band" spectrum it uses for 4G to provide 5G. Verizon and AT&T both offer millimeter-wave-based services, but they're only available in a handful of locations. The wireless industry is focused more on using mid- and low-band frequencies for 5G, because deploying a massive number of millimeter-wave access points will be time-consuming and expensive. In other words, 5G will continue using the same radio frequencies that have been used for decades for broadcast radio and television, satellite communications, mobile services, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.
Verizon Lays Off More Yahoo/AOL Employees (cnn.com) 44
A spokesperson for Verizon Media confirmed the layoffs to CNN Business. "Our goal is to create the best experiences for our consumers and the best platforms for our customers. Today we are investing in premium content, connections and commerce experiences that connect people to their passions and continue to align our resources to opportunities where we feel we can differentiate ourselves and scale faster," the spokesperson said in a statement.
Verizon Kills Email Accounts of Archivists Trying To Save Yahoo Groups History (zdnet.com) 100
"Yahoo banned all the email addresses that the Archive Team volunteers had been using to join Yahoo Groups in order to download data," reported the Yahoo Groups Archive Team. "Verizon has also made it impossible for the Archive Team to continue using semi-automated scripts to join Yahoo Groups -- which means each group must be rejoined one by one, an impossible task (redo the work of the past four weeks over the next 10 days)."
FCC Says Wireless Carriers Lie About Coverage 40% of the Time (vice.com) 54
"Only 62.3% of staff drive tests achieved at least the minimum download speed predicted by the coverage maps -- with U.S. Cellular achieving that speed in only 45.0% of such tests, T-Mobile in 63.2% of tests, and Verizon in 64.3% of tests," the FCC said. And while carriers have historically claimed they offer faster 4G LTE service to the vast majority of the country, the FCC found that wasn't actually true either. "Staff was unable to obtain any 4G LTE signal for 38% of drive tests on U.S. Cellular's network, 21.3% of drive tests on T-Mobile's network, and 16.2% of drive tests on Verizon's network, despite each provider reporting coverage in the relevant area," the agency said. But of course, the FCC also has no plans to punish the carriers.
T-Mobile Shows Why It's Still Too Early To Buy a 5G Phone (cnbc.com) 45
SMS Replacement is Exposing Users To Text, Call Interception Thanks To Sloppy Telecos (vice.com) 32
SRLabs researchers Luca Melette and Sina Yazdanmehr will present their RCS findings at the upcoming Black Hat Europe conference in December, and discussed some of their work at security conference DeepSec on Friday. RCS is a relatively new standard for carrier messaging and includes more features than SMS, such as photos, group chats, and file transfers. Back in 2015, Google announced it would be adopting RCS to move users away from SMS, and that it had acquired a company called Jibe Mobile to help with the transition. RCS essentially runs as an app on your phone that logs into a service with a username and password, Nohl explained.
AT&T and Verizon Agree To Change Their eSIM Practices (engadget.com) 15
FCC Chairman Wants Public Auction To Repurpose Satellite Bands For 5G (engadget.com) 65
Satellite companies, however, might not be so happy. Industry giants like Intelsat and SES haven't been averse to selling their spectrum, but they've wanted a private auction to share the money they make and have claimed the FCC isn't allowed to take in-use spectrum without paying them. A public auction flies in the face of that. The C-Band Alliance, a group representing the satellite firms, has hinted at "protracted litigation" if the FCC pushes forward. Carriers are also of mixed opinions. AT&T, which owns DirecTV, has called C-band an "opportunity" but also wanted compensation and a "reasonable transition plan" to avoid disruptions. Verizon (Engadget's parent company and Pai's former employer) likewise wanted "appropriate incentives and protections" to ensure a quick process.
Share of Cryptocurrency Jobs Grew 1,457% In 4 Years (venturebeat.com) 25
In the past year, the share of cryptocurrency job postings per million on Indeed.com has increased by 26%, while the share of searches per million for jobs has decreased by 53%. Bitcoin's volatility seems to correlate with job seeker interest, and the change in Bitcoin price this year might be why job searches have declined. Employers, however, are doubling down on the technology, which uses decentralized ledgers to produce secure and transparent transactions. The report says that if you want a better chance at getting a job in this field you should be a programmer familiar with basic cryptography, P2P networks, and a language like C++, Java, Python, or JavaScript (along with certain soft crypto skills). To stand out, you should learn new blockchain development languages, like Hyperledger, Bitcoin Script, Ethereum's Solidity, the Ripple protocol, or even languages currently in development -- like Rholang.
The top hirers are as follows: Deloitte, IBM, Accenture, Cisco, Collins Aerospace, Ernst & Young, Coinbase, Overstock, Ripple, Verizon, Circle, Kraken, ConsenSys, JP Morgan Chase, and Signature Bank.