We say reportedly as we have not been able to contact Hilton ourselves and can rely only on reports. They are pretty solid reports, however, and they concern a problem at the company that happened between 21 April and 27 July.

Brian Krebs, of KrebsOnSecurity, started this off with a report about a payment card breach. Krebs said that he had heard about the breach from various sources, and that Visa – the card provider – has mailed potentially affected parties with a warning, and the news that it is the fault of a bricks and mortar company.

Visa did not name the company, but affected parties, or banks to be more precise, have uttered it to Krebs. Its name is Hilton.

“Sources at five different banks say they have now determined that the common point-of-purchase for cards included in that alert had only one commonality: they were all were used at Hilton properties, including the company’s flagship Hilton locations as well as Embassy Suites, Doubletree, Hampton Inn and Suites, and the upscale Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts,” he wrote.

“It remains unclear how many Hilton properties may be affected by this apparent breach. Several sources in the financial industry told KrebsOnSecurity that the incident may date back to November 2014, and may still be ongoing.”

Krebs has a statement from the Hilton organisation in which the firm defended its security practices, and revealed that it is aware of the potential problem and is looking into it. This is a common theme among the breached, and should soon become part of mission statements.

“Hilton Worldwide is strongly committed to protecting our customers’ credit card information,” said the company in the statement to Krebs.

“We have many systems in place and work with some of the top experts in the field to address data security. Unfortunately the possibility of fraudulent credit card activity is all too common for every company in today’s marketplace. We take any potential issue very seriously, and we are looking into this matter.”

We have asked Visa and Hilton for their comments.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/was-the-hilton-hotel-chain-hacked-in-april.html

The average download speed on U.S. 4G networks inched up to 10Mbps (bits per second) in the June-August quarter, according to research company OpenSignal. That was an improvement from 9Mbps in the previous quarter, but the country’s global ranking fell from 43rd as users in other countries made much larger gains.

The U.S. was one of the first countries with commercial LTE service when Verizon Wireless launched its network in late 2010. But other countries that adopted the system later started with better technology, and some have secured more frequencies or rolled out enhancements that U.S. carriers haven’t embraced as much, OpenSignal said.

New Zealand scored the highest average speed in the quarter with 36Mbps, coming up from nowhere in the rankings. But perennial standouts like South Korea and Singapore kept getting faster, too. The average LTE speed in Korea is now 29Mbps (up by 4Mbps), and in Singapore it’s 33Mbps, up by 5Mbps.

OpenSignal collects data on cellular performance through a free app that mobile subscribers can use to measure the speed they’re getting and find faster networks. The results announced Wednesday are based on readings from more than 300,000 users worldwide, the company said.

Countries like Hungary, the Dominican Republic and Morocco beat the U.S. in average LTE speed, but they aren’t necessarily smartphone paradises. Mobile users in America can use LTE more of the time, for example, because their carrier’s networks are built out. Subscribers in the U.S. are on LTE 78 percent of the time, on average, making the country No. 10 for what OpenSignal calls “time coverage.” Moroccan LTE may be fast, but 49 percent of the time, users there don’t get it, for example.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/mobile-category/u-s-falls-to-55th-place-worldwide-for-lte-speeds.html

For the past seven years, a cyberespionage group operating out of Russia on the orders of Tsar Putin have been conducting a series of malware campaigns targeting governments, political think tanks and other organizations.

Researchers at F-Secure have been looking into the antics of an outfit called “the Dukes” which has been active since at least 2008. The group has evolved into a methodical developer of “zero-day” attacks, pulling together their own research with the published work of other security firms to provide a more detailed picture of the people behind a long-running family of malware.

The Dukes specialize in “smash and grab” attacks on networks, but have also used subtle, long-term intrusions that harvested massive amounts of data from their targets.

The group’s targets do include criminal organisations operating in the Russian Federation, which suggest there is some form of policing element to it. But they are mostly interested in Western governments and related organisations, such as government ministries and agencies, political think tanks and governmental subcontractors.

F-Secure team wrote. “Their targets have also included the governments of members of the Commonwealth of Independent States; Asian, African, and Middle Eastern governments; organisations associated with Chechen terrorism; and Russian speakers engaged in the illicit trade of controlled substances and drugs.”

The group was named after its earliest-detected malware, known as PinchDuke. Its targets were associated with the Chechen separatist movement. Later that year they were going after Western governments and organisations in search of information about the diplomatic activities of the United States and the NATO.

Most of the attacks used spear phishing emails as the means of injecting malware onto targeted systems, one of their attacks have spread malware through a malicious Tor exit node in Russia, targeting users of the anonymising network with malware injections into their downloads.

The targets have always followed Russian government interests. There are a number of Russian-language artifacts in some of the malware, including an error message in PinchDuke. GeminiDuke also used timestamps that were adjusted to match Moscow Standard time.

Before the beginning of the Ukraine crisis, the group began using a number of decoy documents in spear phishing attacks that were related to Ukraine. They included a letter undersigned by the First Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine.

However, after the crisis happened the attacks dropped off suggesting that it was an intelligence gathering operation. It is also a big operation, which, if operating in Russia would most likely require state acknowledgement, if not outright support.

Apple’s Tim Cook might have thought yesterday, as he walked away from the cheering crowds of Apple employees and rabid New York Times writers, that he had won the day.

However, Apple shares fell 1.9 percent as shareholders realised that there were no transformative products that could jumpstart the company’s sales ahead of the crucial holiday season.

Apple shares usually drop an average of 0.4 percent on the day of iPhone announcements because the hype never matches the reality but this is a much bigger fall.

The big iPad received a raspberry because it was too big and similar to Microsoft’s Surface tablet and the new iPhones were too similar to those released a year ago. The Apple Surface Pro even came with a stylus, which is something that Apple fanboys mocked for years. In fact the only innovative thing about it was that it required recharging every ten hours making it the chocolate teapot of pencils.

All they had which was new was the 3D Touch which is a “so what?” technology which no one really needed or cares about. It was certainly not worth upgrading to get.

Jobs’ Mob has clearly given up on any pretence of “thinking different” and short of ideas has copied itself and others.

We expected the Apple TV announcement to be hugely disappointing. Apple has mostly dialled back its ambitions this year as it plans a bigger telly service announcement next year. But you would think that after all these years not upgrading the Apple TV, Jobs Mob could have come up with some more interesting hardware.

What we got were demonstrations showed tricks to make viewing easier voice control which can rewind a video for 15 seconds and turn on subtitles, when a viewer asks something like “What did she say?”

Oddly Cook said that Apple had worked really hard, and really long on that project. The new set-top box will include an app store and let developers create new software for Apple TV, including video games.

Again nothing that you can’t get elsewhere and probably a lot cheaper.  We expect the Tame Apple Press will go into damage control limitation exercise and try to convince the world that everything is brilliant.  Watch the comments below for statements from “Apple investors” claiming that their shares have gone up and that there was tons in yesterday’s rally to get excited about.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/are-investors-losing-patience-with-apples-inventiveness.html

The new parts showed up on the compatibility list of socket FM2+ motherboards by BIOSTAR and it is not clear when they will be in the shops.

The architecture mentioned is “Kaveri,” but the silicon could be “Godavari” which is a Kaveri refresh.

The top of the range will be the A10-7890K, which has CPU clock speeds of 4.10 GHz out of the box. We do not know what the TurboCore frequency will be, but the current A10-7870K offers 3.90 GHz with 4.10 GHz TurboCore. The A8-7690K has a CPU clocks of 3.70 GHz. We are not sure what the iGPU clock speeds of the two chips.

The Athlon X4 880K is the most interesting. It has 4.00 GHz CPU clocks. The Athlon X4 FM2+ series lack integrated graphics that means that they are good for those who will buy discrete GPUs, on the FM2+ platform.

All three chips offer unlocked base-clock multipliers, enabling CPU overclocking.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/amd-increases-fm2-lineup.html

The cunning plan is to install electric generating equipment at its factories or even building its own power plant.

Apparently, the company’s electricity bill will go up by 50 per cent over the next ten years as it moves to more-advanced technologies.

Taiwan is already facing power shortage problems and TSMC is worried that its plans could be stuffed up.

TSMC has asked Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) and government-owned Taiwan Power Company (Taipower) about the feasibility of building its own power generators and related regulatory matters.

According to Digitimes companies can set up power generating equipment for use at their own factory sites, but the law has to be revised to allow TSMC to build its own power plant.

TSMC previously pointed out that it does not necessarily need nuclear power unless there is an alternative. We really hope that quote does not mean that TSMC is considering going nuclear.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/is-electricity-in-tsmcs-future.html