Microsoft Says Data Requests Down, Renews Call for Surveillance Reforms

Microsoft said Friday the number of global law enforcement requests for user data fell in 2014 as the tech giant renewed its call for surveillance reforms.

In its twice-yearly "transparency report," Microsoft said the total number of law enforcement requests received in the second half of the year was 31,002, bringing to the total for the year to 65,496 -- down from 72,279 a year earlier.

Some 70 percent of the requests came from five countries -- the United States, France, Britain, Germany and Turkey, the report said.

Microsoft deputy counsel John Frank said in a statement that while law enforcement authorities sometimes need to access data to protect the public, "access should be governed by the rule of law, and not by mandating back doors or weakening the security of our products and services."

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Uber Hires Security Chief From Facebook as Upstarts Compete for Talent

Uber, which is based in San Francisco, last year hired away Travis VanderZanden, a former executive at one of Uber's largest American ride-sharing competitors, Lyft, and brought on the political strategist David Plouffe to lead policy and strategy.

For Uber, hiring in security is particularly important. In February, the company disclosed that it had experienced a breach of its systems, which potentially exposed the names and driver's license identification numbers of as many as 50,000 of the company's drivers.

Uber has also faced criticism for its driver screening process, some lawmakers accusing the company of taking shortcuts on background checks for new drivers. A small number of passengers have alleged that they were physically or sexually assaulted by Uber drivers.

According to his job description, Sullivan will most likely be responsible for several of those areas, from overseeing the security of Uber's vast driver data to improving safety measures for drivers and passengers.

"It's no longer about traditional metrics for safe transportation or keeping our community's data private and secure," Travis Kalanick, chief executive of Uber, said in a statement. "But about how we lead efforts to re

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IBM Says Uncovered Sophisticated Bank Transfer Cyber-Scam

IBM has uncovered a sophisticated fraud scheme run by a well- funded Eastern European gang of cybercriminals that uses a combination of phishing, malware and phone calls that the technology company says has netted more than $1 million from large and medium-sized US companies.

The scheme, which IBM security researchers have dubbed "The Dyre Wolf," is small in comparison with more recent widespread online fraud schemes but represents a new level of sophistication.

According to IBM, since last year the attackers have been targeting people working in companies by sending spam email with unsafe attachments to get a variant of the malware known as Dyre into as many computers as possible.

If installed, the malware waits until it recognizes that the user is navigating to a bank website and instantly creates a fake screen telling the user that the bank's site is having problems and to call a certain number.

If users call that number, they get through to an English-speaking operator who already knows what bank the users think they are contacting. The operator then elicits the users' banking details and immediately starts a large wire transfer to take money out of the relevant account.

The use of a live phone operator is what makes the scheme unique, said Caleb Barlow, vice president of IBM Security.

"What's very different in this case, is we saw a pivot of the attackers to use a set of social engineering techniques that I think are unprecedented," said Barlow. "The focus on wire transfers of large sums of money really got our attention."

IBM did not release any details on which companies fell prey to the scheme or the location of the perpetrators.

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Microsoft Updates Skype and Skype Qik Apps With New Features

Microsoft on Thursday announced an update for Skype for Android and iOS, while also announcing an update for its Skype Qik video app with new video effects for the Android, iOS, and Windows Phone platforms.

In Skype 5.3 for Android, Microsoft has made some 'big changes' under the chat section of the app. Users will now see a bubble-style chat layout on Android, similar to what we have seen on the VoIP service's desktop and iOS versions. Besides sending Skype emoticons, Android users will now also be able to send emojis. Bigger, animated emoticons are also being rolling out in the coming weeks. Speech to text is also supported as a part of the update, when connected to Android Auto.

Some of the other improvements made in the Skype 5.3 for Android include no auto-scrolling of chats resulting in easier catching up on an active conversation; changing and viewing of avatars for all the group chats, and re-entering of username and password after signing out.

This feature will be helpful for those who use multiple Skype accounts.On the other hand, Skype 5.12 for iOS will be getting support for 12 new languages in the coming weeks, including Hindi. Other languages supported are Croatian, Slovak, Catalan, Vietnamese, Thai, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Malay, Turkish, and Estonian.As for the Skype Qik 1.5 for Android, iPhone and Windows Phone platform, the video app now comes with eight new video effects.

On opening the viewfinder, users can now select an effect to apply on the video. Switching from one effect to another is also possible if users want to add multiple effects in their videos.

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Playing Video Games Helps Learn Visual Skills Faster: Study

Playing video games not only improves visual skills but also improves learning ability for acquiring those skills, finds a study from the Brown University.

"When we study perceptual learning, we usually exclude people who have tonnes ofvideo game playing time because they seem to have different visual processing. They are quicker and more accurate," explained senior author and associate professor Yuka Sasaki.To conduct the study, the researchers pitted nine frequent gamers against a control group of nine people who game rarely if ever. They participated in a two-day trial of visual task learning.

Subjects were shown an on-screen "texture" of either vertical or horizontal lines and had to quickly point out - in a fraction of a second - the one area where an anomalous texture appeared.

In visual processing research, this is a standard protocol called a "texture discrimination task".

Sasaki and colleagues trained the subjects on a second similar task soon after training them on the first.If in the first task the main texture was horizontal, for example, the second time it was vertical or vice versa.The gamers managed to improve performance on both tasks while non-gamers did what was expected: They improved on the second task they trained on, but not on the first.

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Delhi Police Look to Recover Stolen Samsung Electronics Components

In a Hollywood-style heist, an unidentified gang of miscreants allegedly drove off with a truck carrying electronic goods worth Rs. 26 crores belonging to Samsung Electronics in south-east Delhi's Kalindi Kunj area, police said.

The incident took place on the night of Wednesday and Thursday as the truck was going from Indira Gandhi International Airport towards Noida in Uttar Pradesh.Sources said police has detained some persons in this connection and is close to cracking the case with the truck, without the stolen goods, being recovered from Uttar Pradesh's Hathras.

"Efforts are being made to recover the robbed goods," said a senior police official."The truck was stopped on a deserted stretch near Kalindi Kunj by some car-borne miscreants around 12.40am behind Apollo hospital. Two persons got off the car and at gunpoint asked the driver and Ghanshyam (25), to alight from the truck. They then beat up the driver and helper and held the duo at knife-point before fleeing with the vehicle which was loaded with Samsung Electronics products worth nearly Rs. 26 crores," said a senior police official.

The duo then stopped another container which was coming from behind and carrying the same products and then informed police. The robbers apparently also removed the GPS from the container truck. Before leaving, the assailants also took away the driver's and helper's phones. Reports add Samsung was transporting components imported from South Korea that included integrated circuits and motherboards of high-end mobile phones.

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Google Says Android Malware Cut in Half, Scans 200 Million Devices a Day

Google said Thursday that malware infections on Android devices have been cut in half in the past year following security upgrades for the mobile platform.

In a security review for 2014, Google said it made significant strides for the platform long seen as weak on security.

Android security engineer Adrian Ludwig said in a blog post that the overall worldwide rate of potentially harmful applications installed dropped by nearly 50 percent between the first quarter and the fourth quarter of the year.Ludwig noted over one billion Android devices in use worldwide have security through Google Play "which conducts 200 million security scans of devices per day" and that fewer than one percent of the devices had potentially harmful apps installed in 2014.

For those devices which only use Google Play apps, the rate of potentially malicious apps was less than 0.15 percent, Google said.The report noted that Android got several security upgrades in 2014, including improved encryption and better detection tools for malware.

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Mozilla Follows Google in Rejecting Chinese Internet Body's Certificates

Mozilla Corp, creator of the popular Firefox Web browser, said on Thursday it would follow Google Inc and no longer recognise new certificates of trust issued by a Chinese Internet agency.

Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox are some of the world's most widely used browsers, and the moves could disrupt users accessing a broad range of Chinese websites.As a result of Mozilla's step, users of Firefox may get a warning when attempting to visit sites certified after April 1 by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), the body that administers China's Internet by allocating and certifying IP addresses and Web domain names.

CNNIC issued a statement on Thursday calling Google's move "unacceptable and unintelligible" and asked the Web giant to consider its users' interests.Zhang Jing, a representative of CNNIC's media relations department, could not immediately provide comment about Mozilla's move when reached late Friday.

Mozilla and Google have both objected to CNNIC delegating its authority to issue certificates to an Egyptian company called MCS Holdings, which mishandled the matter last week.MCS Holdings attributed a security lapse that took place on a test network to human error.

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OnLive Cloud Gaming Service Acquired By Sony and Shut Down

OnLive, one of the pioneers in the still nascent cloud gaming space has sold its patents to Sony for an undisclosed sum and will shutting down operations at the end of the month.

"After five years of uninterrupted service, the OnLive Game Service will be coming to an end. Sony is acquiring important parts of OnLive, and their plans don't include a continuation of the game service in its current form. Your service should continue uninterrupted until April 30, 2015. No further subscription fees will be charged, and you can continue to play all of your games until that date," a post on the OnLive website reads.

Sony acquired OnLive competitor, Gakai, in 2012. Its acquisition of OnLive, immediate winding down and the wording of OnLive's statement that states Sony does not plan to continue the service in its "current form" is perhaps an indication that it plans to use some of the tech behind OnLive to power its PlayStation Now game streaming service that was launched in January.

OnLive was once seen as one of the most promising companies in the gaming space. In 2012, the company claimed to have 1.75 million users. The service offered games you could play on its own console (pictured above), tablets, PCs, smartphones, and TVs and cost $9.99 monthly.

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Twitter Buys TenXer Collaborative Platform for Developers and Engineers

The micro-blogging network has yet to confirm the acquisition, beyond pointing publications to a tweet by Jeffrey Ma.

The TenXer collaborative platform is described as helping "engineering leads be better managers." The firm says it delivers "the key views, stats and insights managers need to be effective and to help their teams be more productive," sourcing data produced by engineers on GitHub, Pivotal, JIRA, and other developer sites.

"TenXer helps engineering teams be more efficient, knowledgable, and productive," adds the company site. TechCrunch, citing people familiar with the matter claims TenXer will be used for internal clients, and not be made available in such as the Fabric developer platform. Twitter has been taking several steps to expand its user base and also monetise the platform.

Since the beginning of the year, Twitter has confirmed its acquisitions of the Periscope live video streaming app - which has since been relaunched with Twitter branding - and Niche, a talent agency that grooms social media stars.

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