An anonymous reader quotes The Hill:
Hackers at at a competition in Las Vegas were able to successfully breach the software of U.S. voting machines in just 90 minutes on Friday, illuminating glaring security deficiencies in America’s election infrastructure. Tech minds at the annual “DEF CON” in Las Vegas were given physical voting machines and remote access, with the instructions of gaining access to the software. According to a Register report, within minutes, hackers exposed glaring physical and software vulnerabilities across multiple U.S. voting machine companies’ products. Some devices were found to have physical ports that could be used to attach devices containing malicious software. Others had insecure Wi-Fi connections, or were running outdated software with security vulnerabilities like Windows XP.
Though some of the machines were out of date, they were all from “major U.S. voting machine companies” like Diebold Nixorf, Sequoia Voting Systems, and WinVote — and were purchased on eBay or at government auctions. One of the machines apparently still had voter registration data stored in plain text in an SQLite database from a 2008 election, according to event’s official Twitter feed.

By Saturday night they were tweeting video of a WinVote machine playing Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

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Source: Slashdot – US Voting Machines Cracked In 90 Minutes At DEFCON

An anonymous reader quotes Fortune:Services helping Chinese users circumvent the “Great Firewall of China” have been pulled from Apple’s Chinese App Store en masse. On Saturday morning, at least some software makers affected by the sweep received notification from Apple that their tools were removed for violating Chinese law. Internet censorship in China restricts communications about topics including democracy, Tibetan freedom, and the 1989 Tienanmen Square protests. The culling primarily seems to have affected virtual private networks, or VPNs, which mask users’ Internet activity and data from outside monitoring. According to a report by the New York Times, many of the most popular such apps are now missing from the Chinese App Store.

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Source: Slashdot – Apple Pulls Anti-Censorship Apps from China’s App Store

schwit1 quotes the Wall Street Journal: Procter & Gamble said that its move to cut more than $100 million in digital marketing spend in the June quarter had little impact on its business, proving that those digital ads were largely ineffective. Almost all of the consumer product giant’s advertising cuts in the period came from digital, finance chief Jon Moeller said on its earnings call Thursday. The company targeted ads that could wind up on sites with fake traffic from software known as “bots,” or those with objectionable content. “What it reflected was a choice to cut spending from a digital standpoint where it was ineffective, where either we were serving bots as opposed to human beings or where the placement of ads was not facilitating the equity of our brands,” he said… The cuts echo marketing executives’ mounting concerns around the efficacy of digital advertising and the growing perception that they are wasting money on digital ads that never reach their intended audience.

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Source: Slashdot – P&G Cuts More Than 0 Million In ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads

evolutionary shares an article from Ars Technica:
San Francisco’s district attorney says that a California state law mandating “theft-deterring technological solutions” for smartphones has resulted in a precipitous drop in such robberies. Those measures primarily include a remote kill switch after a phone has been stolen that would allow a phone to be disabled, withstanding even a hard reset. Such a kill switch has become standard in all iPhones (“Activation Lock”) and Android phones (“Device Protection”) since 2015… When measured from the peak in 2013, “overall robberies involving smartphones have declined an astonishing 50 percent… Because of this hard-fought legislation, stealing a smartphone is no longer worth the trouble, and that means the devices we use every day no longer make us targets for violent crime.”

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Source: Slashdot – Do Kill Switches Deter Cellphone Theft?

Big Hairy Ian shares an article from New Atlas: Desktop Metal — remember the name. This Massachussetts company is preparing to turn manufacturing on its head, with a 3D metal printing system that’s so much faster, safer and cheaper than existing systems that it’s going to compete with traditional mass manufacturing processes… Plenty of design studios and even home users run desktop printers, but the only affordable printing materials are cheap ABS plastics. And at the other end of the market, while organizations like NASA and Boeing are getting valuable use out of laser-melted metal printing, it’s a very slow and expensive process that doesn’t seem to scale well.

But a very exciting company out of Massachusetts, headed by some of the guys who came up with the idea of additive manufacture in the first place, believes it’s got the technology and the machinery to boost 3D printing into the big time, for real. Desktop Metal is an engineering-driven startup whose founders include several MIT professors, and Emanuel Sachs, who has patents in 3D printing dating back to the dawn of the field in 1989. The company has raised a ton of money in the last few months, including some US$115 million in a recent Series D round that brings total equity investments up over US$210 million. That money has come from big players, too, including Google Ventures… And if Desktop Metal delivers on its promises — that it can make reliable metal printing up to 100 times faster, with 10 times cheaper initial costs and 20 times cheaper materials costs than existing laser technologies, using a much wider range of alloys — these machines might be the tipping point for large scale 3D manufacturing.

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Source: Slashdot – 100x Faster, 10x Cheaper: 3D Metal Printing Is About To Go Mainstream

An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica:
Google has expelled 20 Android apps from its Play marketplace after finding they contained code for monitoring and extracting users’ e-mail, text messages, locations, voice calls, and other sensitive data. The apps, which made their way onto about 100 phones, exploited known vulnerabilities to root devices running older versions of Android…. As a result, the apps were capable of surreptitiously accessing sensitive data stored, sent, or received by at least a dozen other apps, including Gmail, Hangouts, LinkedIn, and Messenger. The now-ejected apps also collected messages sent and received by Whatsapp, Telegram, and Viber, which all encrypt data in an attempt to make it harder for attackers to intercept messages while in transit… To conceal their surveillance capabilities, the apps posed as utilities for cleaning unwanted files or backing up data.

Google reports that the malicious apps also had these functions:
Call recordingVOIP recordingRecording from the device microphoneLocation monitoringTaking screenshotsTaking photos with the device camera(s)Fetching device information and filesFetching user information (contacts, call logs, SMS, application-specific data)
12 hours later an antivirus provider reported two more Google Play apps could surreptitiously steal text messages by downloading a malicious plugin — and that the apps had already been downloaded at least 100,000 times.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Stealthy Google Play Apps Recorded Calls and Stole Emails