In fact, the highest rated provider, SSE, has only been in the broadband game since 2014, with Yorkshire-based Plusnet coming in second place, says Cable.co.uk.

Of the big names, TalkTalk provides broadband to 13 percent of UK internet users, yet it scored just 6.66 out of 10 and placed in ninth position. The four biggest companies account for 87 percent of the market, but the best performer — Sky — only managed to hit fifth place.

Full article found here.

The news came about when IT security firm Trend Micro issued a statement on Thursday April 14 that said: “We’re putting the word out that everyone should follow Apple’s guidance and uninstall QuickTime for Windows as soon as possible.

“The only way to protect your Windows systems from potential attacks against these or other vulnerabilities in Apple QuickTime now is to uninstall it.”

It is worth noting that the warning does not apply for Apple users.

Quicktime is a popular software developed by Apple that allows users to play media files such as videos, images, and audio. Apple have now stopped producing updates of Quicktime for Windows users. This means that Windows users will now be permanently vulnerable, as Apple will not provide security updates to patch the problem.

The Department of Homeland Security’s United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team also issued a security alert on Thursday, which stated: “Potential negative consequences include loss of confidentiality, integrity, or availability of data, as well as damage to system resources or business assets. The only mitigation available is to uninstall QuickTime for Windows.”

However, don’t fret – the bulk of recent media-related programmes on Windows do not use Quicktime anymore. Instead, most can play the media directly or through media support integrated into Windows. That includes iTunes 10.5 or later.

That said, even if you did not actively download the programme, there’s a chance it could still be on computer through downloading other software, such as older versions of iTunes. So, perhaps you better give you tech-savvy grandma a heads up.

For more information on the more technical details on the bugs visit the Trend Microwebsite. You can also see how to simply uninstall QuickTime for Windows here.

[H/T Reuters]

According to the survey, and alarmingly for the television industry, it was found that only 36% of the audience surveyed, consumers aged 13-24, said they can’t live without traditional television.

Online entertainment source Variety revealed that online services like YouTube and Netflix topped the list of must-have sources with general social media services taking up third place as video content is increasingly shared and viewed on these platforms.

For financially independent young viewers, only 56% expect to subscribe to traditional TV cable or satellite while 86% expect to subscribe to Netflix.

Article found here.

Prosecutors have announced the first criminal conviction in connection with the 2014 hacking of Hollywood celebrities that resulted in the online release of hundreds of private nude photos.

Officials in Los Angeles said Tuesday that 36-year-old Ryan Colins of Pennsylvania agreed to enter a guilty plea on hacking charges as part of the “Celebgate” investigation.

Authorities said Collins admitted to a “phishing” scheme to obtain passwords of more than 100 people, many of them movie stars, and then using that to obtain nude pictures from their “cloud” storage accounts.

But the officials said there was no evidence that Collins published the pictures online, and that the investigation was continuing.

The 2014 hack resulted in the release of hundreds of nude photos including those of models and actresses such as Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton, stunning Hollywood.

The US attorney’s office said Collins accessed at least 50 iCloud accounts and 72 Gmail accounts, most of which belonged to female celebrities.

“Today, people store important private information in their online accounts and in their digital devices,” said US Attorney Eileen Decker.

“Lawless unauthorized access to such private information is a criminal offense. My office remains committed to protecting sensitive and personal information from the malicious actions of sophisticated hackers and cyber criminals.”

According to the plea agreement, Collins from November 2012 until September 2014 used a scheme in which he sent e-mails to victims that appeared to be from Apple or Google and asked victims to provider their usernames and passwords.

This allowed him to access data from the accounts including photographs stored in the cloud. In some instances, Collins would use a software program to download the entire contents of the victims’ Apple iCloud backups.

Prosecutors said the agreement, which must be approved by a judge, calls for an 18-month prison sentence. The case is set to be transferred from California to Pennsylvania under the deal.

Article found here.

Apple customers were targeted by hackers over the weekend in the first campaign against Macintosh computers using a pernicious type of software known as ransomware, researchers with Palo Alto Networks have revealed.

Ransomware, one of the fastest-growing types of cyber threats, encrypts data on infected machines, then typically asks users to pay ransoms in hard-to-trace digital currencies to get an electronic key so they can retrieve their data.

Security experts estimate that ransoms total hundreds of millions of dollars a year from such cyber criminals, who typically target users of Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

Ryan Olson, threat intelligence director at Palo Alto, said the “KeRanger” malware, which appeared on Friday 4 March, was the first functioning ransomware attacking Apple’s Mac computers.

“This is the first one in the wild that is definitely functional, encrypts your files and seeks a ransom,” Olson said in a telephone interview with Reuters.

An Apple representative said the company had taken steps over the weekend to prevent attacks by revoking a digital certificate from a legitimate Apple developer that enabled the rogue software to install on Macs. The representative said he could not immediately provide other details.

The malware is programmed to encrypt files on an infected personal computer three days after the original infection, according to Olson.

That means that if Apple’s steps prove ineffective in neutralising malware that has already infected Macs, the earliest victims will have their files encrypted on Monday, three days after the malicious program first appeared on theTransmission website, he said.

The Transmission site offers the open source software that was infected with the ransomware.

Palo Alto said it planned to release a blog advising Mac users on ways to check to see if they were infected with the virus and steps they can take to protect against it harming their data, Olson said.

Transmission is one of the most popular Mac applications used to download software, videos, music and other data through the BitTorrent peer-to-peer information sharing network, according to Olson.

Representatives with Transmission could not be reached immediately for comment.

Transmission carried a warning on Sunday saying that version 2.90 of its Mac software had been infected with malware.

It advised users to immediately upgrade to version 2.91 of the software, which was available on its website, or delete the malicious one.

It also provided technical information on how users could check to see if they were affected.

Article found here.

The email users get look a bit like this:

Attached is an Invoice Word document. It talks about remit payments.Virustotal here.

If Office macros are enabled it drops ladybi.exe, Virustotal here.

AV coverage is very poor – after over 24 hours in the wild, only 3 very niche vendors detect it. Update: most major antivirus products now detect, with the latest updates.

That loads itself into memory, deletes itself, encrypts your documents as hash.locky files, changes the desktop wallpaper, drops a .bmp file and opens it, drops a .txt file and opens it, and delete VSS snapshots. Encrypted files can include network files.

Article found here.

Washington:

In the Umea University study, occupational therapists are shown to promote participation, reduce experiences of loneliness and strengthen seniors’ social network using an Internet-based intervention programme.

Researcher Ellinor Larsson said that digitization is increasing the risk of excluding seniors who often can have limited experiences of Internet-based activities, adding that a steadily increasing amount of everyday activities require access to the Internet, and to achieve increased participation in society, we need to pay attention to an increased inclusion of seniors.

Larsson noted that the senior citizen can also experience social change at the loss of loved ones, which makes the loneliness more evident. A joint effort focusing on how the well-being of the elderly can be promoted through meaningful Internet-based activities is becoming more important in order to support the ageing population of today’s society.

In her dissertation, Larsson describes how health-promoting efforts aimed at the seniors can be developed. To enable Internet-based social interventions for seniors, collaboration between several parties in society is needed.

The study appears in DISSERTATIONS.

Article found here.

A large portion of Americans appear to be willing to share their personal information in exchange for a product or service, but some offers are more attractive than others.

That is the takeaway from a new Pew Research Center report based on a survey of 461 U.S. adults and 80 participants in nine focus groups on attitudes toward what Pew billed as the “key tradeoff” of the digital economy.

Pew offered up six hypothetical tradeoffs involving sharing varying degrees of personal data and asked whether that tradeoff was acceptable.

The largest percentage (54%) said they were OK with facial recognition cameras in the workplace to catch thieves of employees’ personal belongings, with the footage staying on file as long as the company wished, and even if it were used to measure employee attendance and performance. Only 24% said that would not be acceptable, with 21% saying it would depend on circumstances. There were no statistically significant differences in answers by age or gender or income.

Far fewer would trade personal data for receiving targeted advertising in the scenario presented by Pew. That scenario was free access to a social media platform that allowed for interaction with other alumni for an upcoming reunion in exchange for creating a profile and supplying a photo that would be used by the site to deliver tailored advertising.

Only 33% said that tradeoff would be acceptable, while 51% said it was not and 15% said it depended on the circumstances.

The generational breakdown is telling. Four of 10 under 50 said they were OK with that, but only 24% of those over 50 said it was acceptable.

“Many policy makers and companies are anxious to know where Americans drawn the line on privacy – when they will resist privacy intrusions and when they are comfortable with sharing personal data,” said Lee Rainie, director of Internet, science, and technology research at Pew and author of the report. “These findings show how people’s decisions are often context-specific and contingent. A phrase that summarizes their attitudes is, ‘It depends.’ Most are likely to consider options on a case-by-case basis, rather than apply hard-and-fast privacy rules.”

Article found here.

Neurologists from two universities in Germany (BG University Hospital Bergmannsheil and Ruhr University Bochum) and led by Lara Schlaffke teamed up to begin to understand the physical basis of this odd sensory perception provided by The Dress. They used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to view the brains of 28 experimental participants while viewing the dress (14 who saw it as black and blue, and 14 who saw it as white and gold). The hope was that the activity shown in the brains of the two groups would be somehow different, offering a clue as to what was going on to generate the difference of opinion.

There was indeed a difference in the brain scans of the two groups of dress viewers. As published in the journal Cortex, “the people who see the dress as white and gold showed extra activation in a raft of brain areas, including in frontal, parietal (near the crown of the head) and temporal (near the ears) regions.” These regions of the brain are involved in active interpretation of visual stimuli, so basically the scans suggest that white and gold dress viewers’ brains were doing more active processing of the dress image to arrive at their opinion.

It’s normal for our brains to do some active processing of visual stimuli. For instance, an ability known as “color constancy” means that humans understand that some objects maintain their same colors even when viewed in different levels of ambient lighting. The software in our minds does this automatically; we don’t have to choose to adjust for lighting conditions when we see stuff. But this same automaticity means that there are a few edge cases, like The Dress, where people’s brains are drawing different conclusions as to its “real” color, and feeling absolutely sure of their own opinion because it was generated so naturally. Interestingly, the participants did not disagree on the colors when shown modified images of The Dress where the lighting around it was less weird. So something about this judgment mechanism is what’s causing our disagreements.

If you combine these findings with pre-existing results about surveys on The Dress, it actually has interesting implications. Dress viewers were pretty evenly divided between team black and blue and team white and gold across several demographic categories, including gender, location, and iPhone/Android. Though it’s too little data to draw broad conclusions, the new study might suggest, for instance, that there is no broad gender difference in active versus passive color processing, because otherwise The Dress viewers would have split less evenly along gender lines. Hopefully more future research can examine these and other possibilities.

Article found here.

Trends had been largely unchanged since 2012, a helpful but slightly backdated look at subjects people were searching for over the last day or more. As of today, you can see minute-by-minute information culled from the 100 billion searches that take place on Google at any given month. Not only that, but Trends now pulls in information from Google News and YouTube, for a fuller view of what people want to know.

In many ways, insight into what people are searching for is even more powerful than what they already know, says Steve Grove, head of Google’s News Lab.

“Social media data focuses on what people are talking about publicly. Search data goes a layer deeper than that, in some ways, to what people are really interested in.” Grove tells to WIRED. “When you’re searching, you’re not really editing yourself. You find out what people are really interested in. It’s very real, very raw, very personal.”

It also highlights the distance between what’s being reported and what people want to know; if you already have a good read on the Nest Cam, you’re less likely to use Google to find additional information about it. That in turn helps explains why real-time trends can be so illuminating. There’s a much larger curiosity gap on breaking news—when there are still plenty of unknowns to to the media as well—and, say, the state of the Republican primary race.

While that may appear to make Google Trends a sort of populist news ticker—showing what people are genuinely interested in versus what a newsroom bestows importance on—Trends doesn’t quite work that way. Rather than pure volume, it tracks surges of interest relative to how much those items usually generate. “We’re looking for spikes in particular topic areas that we then normalize,” explains Grove. “You can imagine if it was just volume overall, you’d see the same sort of topics every day.” That’s why headliners like the NBA Finals sit alongside less obvious hits like the Alameda County Fair in the top 10 “trending stories” as of this writing.

The new Google Trends also goes well beyond just headlines, though many of the features are just cleaner, more detailed versions of what was previously available. You can still access handy charts comparing how various search terms have fared over time, just now with minute-by-minute granularity. A “featured stories” section displays search data pre-sorted in a variety of visually grabby ways. A series of regularly updated data sets provide pre-packaged looks at everything from how interest in MERS and Ebola has evolved to which Copa America teams are the most search-engine sought-after. And the whole page has gotten a healthy dollop of material design.

If you’re a journalist or a researcher, the benefits of insight into what people want to know right nowshould be self-evident; you’re probably already tinkering. Even if you’re not, though, it’s worth touring the new Google Trends for the fun visualizations, sure, but also for a look at where the Internet is out of step with the news. Or maybe just a quick rundown of what’s going on in Alameda County; I hear they’ve got a great fair lined up.

Article found here.