5 Security Holes Almost Everyone's Vulnerable To

Problems with security seem to pop up all the time?from an easy to hack router to apps that leak your data into the world. Thankfully, it's pretty easy to protect yourself. Here's how to do it.

Unless you keep up to date on all the security news, it's easy to miss a bit here and there about what has been exploited and what hasn't. We're all vulnerable at some point, and if you haven't touched the settings on your computer since you took it out of the box, it might be time to take another look.

Already know about these security holes and have them patched up? Good for you! Send this along to your friends who don't to help keep them safe.

UPnP Allows Access to Your Gear from Outside Sources

UPnP (Universal Plug and Play), a component meant to make devices like routers, printers, and media players easy to discover on a network, has been accused of having security holes for a long time, but this week the US Government suggested you disable it yet again. The most recent study suggests 40 million to 80 million network-enabled devices responded to discovery requests from the internet and are vulnerable to an attack that gives hackers access to webcams, printers, passwords, and more. This means routers and devices with the bug can be accessed from the internet to remotely screw with your system even if you don't have malware installed.

The good news is that most of the affected hardware is old, and the problem likely isn't as widespread as it seems. That said, in the case of most devices, you can turn UPnP off in the settings (look in your manual for directions). The UPnP setting on your router doesn't have anything to do with the protocol that lets you stream media over a network, print from inside the network, or anything similar. Turning it off on the router level only blocks you from controlling these devices over the internet, which most people don't need to do.

To turn it off on a router level, you pop into the admin page and disable UPnP. If you want to check your hardware, security site Rapid7 has made a tool to scan devices on your network.

As far as security risks go, this one's easy to fix and it's not going to affect a lot of people these days. The rest of these are much worse.

WEP/WPA Passwords on Your Router Are Easy to Crack

Chances are that your router is using either a WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) password or a WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) password. Unfortunetly, it's pretty simple to crack a Wi-Fi network's WPA password and a WEP password.

Both of these vulnerabilities exist for different reasons. In the case of WEP, it's as simple as cracking the password with an automated encyrption program (and a lot of time), while in WPA, it's more about a vulnerability in WPS (Wi-fi Protected Setup) on certain routers. This can be corrected by turning WPS off. If you can't turn WPS off, you can install DD-WRT or Tomato so you can. DD-WRT should add a nice security layer to your home network.

Browsing Without HTTPS Leaves Your Vulnerable to Snoopers

HTTP Secure is the protocol used to secure everything that you send online that's important. This includes your bank information, social networks, and just about everything else that needs security. For your home network, you can simply install the HTTPS browser extension that ensures you'll always use the secure version of a site so your data doesn't fall into the wrong hands. Without HTTPS, your personal data is far more likely to fall through a security hole and into the hands of some nefarious person.

While it's important to use HTTPS at home, it's far more important to always use it on public Wi-Fi. At places like hotels, airports, or libraries, someone is probably snooping out your passwords. Your best solution for public Wi-Fi is to use a VPN (virtual private network) to route your traffic safely and securely.

All the Apps, Software, and Websites You Use Might Accidentally Leak Data

It happens time and time again. A hacker finds an exploit, and suddenly all your favorite software and web sites are vulnerable to people snagging your passwords. This might make your entire system insecure, it may give your passwords away, or they're leaking your personal data like name and address. This happens with Java constantly, but it has happened to pretty much everyone at some point, including: Mega, Google Wallet, Apple, Skype, Path, Zappos, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

First off, you need to keep your software up to date. This means both your operating system and your mobile software. Generally, when your data is leaked, someone notices, and the software is patched up right away.

It's not exactly the perfect solution, but since the security holes are on the service or software side, it's all you can do. That said, make sure you have: two-factor authentication enabled where you can, you use a different password for every site, and use a a password system like LastPass to ensure your leaked data doesn't reveal enough information to get your login information for another service.

Strong Passwords Aren't Enough to Protect Against Everything

When it boils down to it, a good password only gets you so far. Certain security holes, like social engineering hacks can happen when a skilled hacker bypasses technical protections (like a strong password) to get the information they want from talking to a person?no "real" hacking is required. It's exactly what happened last year when the Apple and Amazon exploits were uncovered in Mat Honan's hack.

In short, people are one of the biggest security holes in the larger chain. Hackers can use psychological tricks to get your information, they might pose as someone important, as a Facebook friend, or even as you when talking with customer support. With a little information, they can then gain access to your account. If that account uses the same password as everywhere else, they essentially get access to everything you do. Thankfully, you can protect yourself with a few simple tips.

The main goal is to make sure you don't have all your eggs in one basket. That means if someone gets one password to one site, they can't get in elsewhere. So, never use the same password more than once, use two-factor authentication, get creative with your security questions, and monitor your accounts.

Plugging up these security holes isn't exactly a fun way to spend an afternoon, but it's certainly more entertaining than waking up one morning to find someone has stolen your identity. It's also a pretty easy process, and once you're set up you don't need to do much else.

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/eUUAxEsbZao/5-security-holes-almost-everyones-vulnerable-to

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Oil up slightly after mixed US economic reports

NEW YORK (AP) ? The price of oil rose on Monday after a strong durable goods report in the U.S.

Demand for long-lasting manufactured goods rose sharply in December with gains in volatile aircraft orders, the Commerce Department said. But the number of pending home sales fell last month after hitting a 2 ? year high in November.

Benchmark oil rose 25 cents to $96.13 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

It's a big week for U.S. economic indicators. In addition to Monday's data, the government will release reports on weekly jobless claims, unemployment and fourth-quarter growth. And the Federal Reserve's policy committee holds a two-day meeting that concludes on Wednesday.

At the pump, the average price for a gallon of gas rose over the weekend to $3.35, the highest level since the second week of December.

Brent crude, used to price international varieties of oil, was down 27 cents to $113.01 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange in London.

In other energy futures trading on Nymex:

? Wholesale gasoline rose 5 cents to $2.94 per gallon.

? Natural gas fell 12 cents to $3.34 per 1,000 cubic feet.

? Heating oil was unchanged at $3.04 a gallon.

___

Pamela Sampson in Bangkok and Pablo Gorondi in Budapest contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2013-01-28-Oil%20Prices/id-d37a993bc6e842a9abb7d455f9afb155

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Israel central bank chief to step down in June

JERUSALEM (AP) ? Israel's central bank governor, Stanley Fischer, has submitted his resignation.

The Bank of Israel said Tuesday that Fischer told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he would step down on June 30. It gave no reason for his departure, which comes two years before his term is set to end.

Fischer, an internationally respected economist who was deputy director of the International Monetary Fund, has won widespread acclaim for keeping the Israeli economy stable at a time of great global turmoil. Israel's economy continues to grow, and unemployment is roughly 6 percent.

In a statement, Netanyahu called Fischer a "central partner" in Israel's economic growth.

Fischer was appointed to a second five-year term in 2010.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2013-01-29-Israel-Economy/id-3f370459dd1648dd984bf7dafb383691

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Soundrop Goes Beyond Spotify With Listening Rooms And Videos On Facebook, And Coming Soon To A Platform Near You

Soundrop, the social "listening room" service that is similar to Turntable.fm,?has found a lot of success on the music streaming service Spotify, with 500 million streams of its rooms in its debut year. Now, Oslo, Noway-based Soundrop is taking its growth strategy up a notch: from today, people can also create and embed listening rooms in Facebook, too.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/P4o4aIc3Fl0/

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Dot Earth Blog: Weaker Global Warming Seen in Study Promoted by Norway's Research Council

| Updates below |
Purveyors of climate doubt have seized on a news release from the Research Council of Norway with this provocative title: ?Global warming less extreme than feared?? The release describes new research finding that global warming from the buildup of greenhouse gases will be on the low end of the persistently wide spread of projections by other research groups. (There?s a presentation describing the work below.)

[Jan. 27, 9:28 a.m. | Update |With Twitter assistance from Norway, the history of this news release is becoming clearer. It appears to be a fresh English translation of a release from October describing a study (Aldrin et al., below) that had been published. Read on for the rest of the initial post, but this incident no longer calls out for a "publicity before peer review" warning.]

[Post as published Jan. 26:] This may well end up being the case (I?d give it higher than even odds; even so, that doen?t justify an ?all clear? alert). But this particular analysis has, as yet, not been published in a peer-reviewed journal. This means that although the release comes from a prestigious government science agency, the work needs a publicity before publication caution label. I created one just for this purpose (above) and will use it when needed.

This is hardly the first instance of a promotion-before-review approach to climate discourse. For instance, Richard Muller?s Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project took this path (one of that group?s five papers has finally made it into a journal). (This phenomenon is not limited to climate science, of course; here?s an example related to the fight over gas drilling.)

Earlier today I sent the following query to the Research Council of Norway and I?ll update this post when I hear more:

With some urgency I?m trying to get some clarity on the status of the climate sensitivity analysis that the Research Council promoted yesterday. Is it published in a peer-reviewed journal? The only relevant study I could find was published last year (see below).

Perhaps it?s more like a U.S. National Academy report? If so, please describe the level of peer review. The work is being?aggressively disseminated?by bloggers and news outlets that focus on any research casting doubt on the importance of greenhouse-driven warming.

Thanks for any input clarifying the status of the research and explaining why it was released now if it?s?not yet accepted for publication?

I included a link to a presentation on the paper (which you can find below) and to this relevant paper from last year:

Bayesian estimation of climate sensitivity based on a simple climate model fitted to observations of hemispheric temperatures and global ocean heat content

Magne Aldrin,?Marit Holden,?Peter Guttorp,?Ragnhild Bieltvedt Skeie, Gunnar Myhre,?Terje Koren Berntsen

Here?s a presentation about the new analysis of global warming (the closest thing I?ve seen to the paper itself):

Norwegian Study Finds Limited Warming from Doubled Greenhouse Gases by Andrew Revkin

Finally, for those who want to dig in a bit, here?s a comment I received from Reto Knutti, a Swiss climate scientist, after I sent the Norwegian release and presentation around:

As you said, Aldrin et al. (DOI: 10.1002/env.2140) is published, whereas Skeie et al. is not yet as far as I know. But here are some thoughts that are largely independent of this paper to put these types of studies in context.

If you look at the Fig. 3a in our review (red lines at the top) you see that many previous estimates based on the observed warming/ocean heat uptake had a tendency to peak at values below 3?C (that review is from 2008). The Norwegian study is just another one of these studies looking at the global energy budget. The first ones go back more than a decade, so the idea is hardly new. The idea is always the same: if you assume a distribution for the observed warming, the ocean heat uptake, and the radiative forcing, then you can derive a distribution for climate sensitivity.

What is obvious is that including the data of the past few years pushes the estimates of climate sensitivity downward, because there was little warming over the past decade despite a larger greenhouse gas forcing. Also in some datasets the ocean warming in the top 700 meters is rather small, with very small uncertainties (Levitus GRL 2012), pushing the sensitivity down further. However, in my view one should be careful in over interpreting these results for several reasons:

a) the uncertainties in the assumed radiative forcings are still very large. Recently, Solomon et al. Science (2010, 2011) raised questions about the stratospheric water vapor and aerosol, and just days ago there was another paper arguing for a larger effect of black carbon (http://www.agu.org/news/press/pr_archives/2013/2013-01.shtml, a massive 280 pages?).

b) Results are sensitive to the data used, as shown by Libardoni and Forest DOI: 10.1029/2011GL049431 and others, and particularly sensitive to how the last decade of data is treated. Very different methods (detection attribution optimal fingerprint) have also shown that the last decade makes a difference (Gillett et al. 2011, doi:10.1029/2011GL050226).

c) The uncertainties in the ocean heat uptake may be underestimated by Levitus, and there are additional uncertainties regarding the role of deep ocean heat uptake (Meehl et al. 2011 Nature Climate Change).

Even though we have many of these studies (and I am responsible for a couple of them) I?m getting more and more nervous about them, because they are so sensitive to the climate model, the prior distributions, the forcing, the ocean data, the error model, etc. The reason for this, to a large extent, is that the data constraint is weak, so the outcome (posterior) is dominated by what you put in (prior).

It is important to note that the IPCC assessment of climate sensitivity is based on many lines of evidence (see Fig. 3 in our 2008 review for an overview). The observed energy budget is just one of them. The latest paleoclimate synthesis (Rohling et al. Nature 2012) supports the ?likely 2-4.5?C?, and all GCMs have sensitivities in the range 2-5?C, the mean in CMIP5 is above 3?C, and once you start evaluating models with observations that tends to get pushed upward (Fasullo and Trenberth, Science 2012).

Finally, note that the effect of the last few years of data is smaller on the transient climate response than on climate sensitivity. It?s the transient climate response (TCR) that determines the 21st century warming and peak warming.

7:52 a.m. |Update

I was remiss in not including a link to an excellent recent breakdown of the climate sensitivity question at RealClimate.org. Gavin Schmidt describes the different approaches to the question, and why there are essentially two conclusions, both surrounded by different kinds of uncertainty. His takeaway line:

[T]he ?meta-uncertainty? across the methods remains stubbornly high with support for both relatively low numbers around 2?C and higher ones around 4?C, so that is likely to remain the consensus range.

(There?s a part 2 post there focused on the role of clouds in warming.)

10:56 a.m. |Update

The same goes for Judith Curry?s long exploration of the mix of modeling and observations leading to the range of possible warming projections from a doubling of pre-industry carbon dioxide concentrations.

11:42 a.m. |Update

This paper is deeply relevant (Roger A. Pielke, Jr., of the University of Colorado sent a link as part of an e-mail discussion with other climate science and policy researchers:

Anchoring Devices in Science for Policy: The Case of Consensus around Climate Sensitivity

1. Jeroen van der Sluijs1,
2. Jos?e van Eijndhoven2,
3. Simon Shackley3?and
4. Brian Wynne4

This paper adds a new dimension to the role of scientific knowledge in policy by emphasizing the multivalent character of scientific consensus. We show how the maintained consensus about the quantitative estimate of a central scientific concept in the anthropogenic climate-change field ? namely, climate sensitivity ? operates as an `anchoring device? in `science for policy?. In international assessments of the climate issue, the consensus-estimate of 1.5?C to 4.5?C for climate sensitivity has remained unchanged for two decades. Nevertheless, during these years climate scientific knowledge and analysis have changed dramatically. We identify several ways in which the scientists achieved flexibility in maintaining the same numbers for climate sensitivity while accommodating changing scientific ideas.

We propose that the remarkable quantitative stability of the climate sensitivity range has helped to hold together a variety of different social worlds relating to climate change, by continually translating and adapting the meaning of the `stable? range. But this emergent stability also reflects an implicit social contract among the various scientists and policy specialists involved, which allows `the same? concept to accommodate tacitly different local meanings. Thus the very multidimensionality of such scientific concepts is part of their technical imprecision (which is more than just analytical lack of resolution); it is also the source of their resilience and value in bridging (and perhaps reorganizing) the differentiated social worlds typical of modern policy issues. The varying importance of particular dimensions of knowledge for different social groups may allow cohesion to be sustained amidst pluralism, and universality to coexist with cultural distinctiveness.

Source: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/26/weaker-global-warming-seen-in-study-promoted-by-norways-research-council/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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SAG Awards 2013: Complete Winners List

'Argo' once again takes the top honor, and Jennifer Lawrence continues win streak.
By MTV News staff

Jennifer Lawrence accepts her award for Best Actress at the SAG Awards 2013
Photo: John Shearer

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1700859/sag-awards-2013-winners-list.jhtml

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Feeling flirty? Wait for the sun to shine

Jan. 28, 2013 ? We all know how casual flirtation can lift one's mood, which can be important at this time of year when the winter blues are at their peak. But if you are more serious about your flirting and hope to get that all important phone number, you're better off waiting until it's sunny, according to new French research published in the journal Social Influence.

Nicolas Gu?guen of the University of South Brittany -- who has previously investigated how wearing red lipstick can increase a waitress' tips -- conducted a study in which an 'attractive' 20 year old male approached 18-25 year old women walking alone in the street and asked them for their phone numbers. The women were solicited on both sunny and cloudy (but not rainy) days, when the temperature was about the same.

In the past other environmental factors have been found to make people more likely to flirt or exchange phone numbers -- the presence of pleasant smells, romantic music or certain colours have all been found to have an effect.

Previous research has also shown how the weather can affect certain social behaviours -- sunshine makes people more likely to help strangers or answer a survey, and people tend to leave bigger tips in restaurants on sunny days. But this is the first research to explore how the weather may influence courtship or dating behaviour.

It was found that women were more receptive to being approached and flirted with -- and give out their phone numbers -- on sunny days: over a fifth -- 22.4% -- of women did so when the sun was out, as opposed to 13.9% on the cloudy days.

(The phone numbers were later used to contact the women and tell them the true nature of the study, as per the recommendation of the ethics committee of the lab which reviewed the project!)

The message seems clear: flirting is more likely to have a positive outcome on sunny days. But Professor Gu?guen was careful to include certain caveats regarding the applicability of the research to everyday situations: the sunshine (or other factors) may after all have improved the attractive 20 year old male's flirting skills on those days. Other atmospheric conditions such as windiness or humidity were not accounted for. And, perhaps most crucially, the research was conducted in France, where 'men traditionally approach women in romantic relationships'.

The journal article concludes with suggestions for further study in this area -- for instance, are men themselves more likely to initiate flirting behaviour when the sun is shining? We'll have to wait until the Spring to find out!

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Taylor & Francis, via AlphaGalileo.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Nicolas Gu?guen. Weather and courtship behavior: A quasi-experiment with the flirty sunshine. Social Influence, 2013; : 1 DOI: 10.1080/15534510.2012.752401

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/living_well/~3/nJgVrRL2lXo/130128081950.htm

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